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CRITICISMS    OF    LIFE 
STUDIES  IN  FAITH,  HOPE,  AND  DESPAIR 


CRITICISMS  OF  LIFE 

STUDIES  IN  FAITH,  HOPE 
AND  DESPAIR 


BY 

HORACE  J.  BRIDGES 


BOSTON    AND    NEW   YORK 

HOUGHTON   MIFFLIN   COMPANY 

^tz  laiter^ibe  ^rei^j^  Cambntige 

MDCCCCXV 


37 


COPYRIGHT,   1915,   BY  HORACE  J.   BRIDGES 
ALL  RIGHTS  RESERVED 

Published  March  tqis 


TO  MY  SPIRITUAL   FATHER 
STANTON   COIT 

IN  GLAD  ACKNOWLEDGMENT 
OF  AN  ETERNAL  DEBT 


O 


00319 


**  Why  dost  thou  wonder,  O  Man,  at  the  height 
of  the  stars  or  the  depth  of  the  sea  ?  Enter 
into  thine  own  soul,  and  wonder  there  *' 


CONTENTS 

Introduction xi 

I.  Francis  Thompson's  "The  Hound  of  Heaven": 
A  Study  in  Religious  Experience     .      .      .      i 

II.  Mr.  G.  K.  Chesterton  as  Theologian       .      .    42 

III.  Professor  Ernst  Haeckel's  New  Calvinism    .    77 

IV.  Sir  Oliver  Lodge  and  the  Evidence  for  Im- 

mortality   121 

V.  Mr.  Winston  Churchill  and  Clerical  "Heresy"  147 

VI.  Ellen  Key  and  the  "New  Morality"  of  Free 

Love 176 

VII.  The  Right  to  Die:  Maeterlinck  and  Ingersoll 

VERSUS  Humanity 227 

VIII.  The  Victorious  Death  of  Captain  Scott  .      .  263 
Epilogue:  In  the  Time  of  War  and  Tumults     .      .284 


INTRODUCTION 

The  eight  studies  which  make  up  the  present  volume 
are  intended  primarily  as  illustrations  of  the  faith  and 
hope  by  which  men  actually  live  to-day.  In  those 
covered  by  the  term  "Despair  "  in  the  title,  the  purpose 
has  been  not  merely  to  criticize  the  doctrines  rejected, 
but  to  justify  faith  and  hope  by  destroying  the  groimds 
of  their  opposites. 

It  is  the  writer's  belief  that  the  principles  which  he 
has  endeavoured  partially  to  set  forth,  though  they 
are  not  as  yet  embodied  in  the  formal  creed  of  any 
Church,  and  indeed  are  in  radical  conflict  with 
many  accepted  ecclesiastical  doctrines,  are  neverthe- 
less principles  which  do  in  fact  regulate  the  action  of 
ever- widening  circles  of  mankind. 

We  are  accustomed  to  a  somewhat  superficial  an- 
tithesis between  creed  and  conduct.  We  commonly 
hear  men  spoken  of  as  being  "better  than  their 
creed.''  The  antithesis  has  been  formulated  by  Mr. 
Bernard  Shaw  in  the  statement  that  "What  a  man  be- 
lieves may  be  ascertained,  not  from  his  creed,  but  from 
the  assumptions  on  which  he  habitually  acts."  This, 
however,  is  merely  a  slapdash,  journalistic  way  of 
speaking.  The  fallacy  it  contains  becomes  self-evident 
the  moment  we  substitute  for  the  Latin  word  "creed" 


xli  INTRODUCTION 

its  English  equivalent.  If  we  do  this,  Mr.  Shaw's 
statement  will  run,  "What  a  man  believes  may  be 
ascertained,  not  from  his  belief,  but  from  the  assump- 
tions on  which  he  habitually  acts."  Quite  evidently, 
this  will  not  do;  but  it  enables  us  to  see  and  state  the 
truth  which  Mr.  Shaw  has  aimed  at  and  missed.  The 
assumptions  on  which  a  man  habitually  acts  are  his 
creed;  and  if  he  professes  to  beheve  doctrines  incom- 
patible with  these  assumptions,  he  misunderstands 
himself. 

Now,  my  contention  is  that  large  numbers  of  per- 
fectly sincere  religious  people  are  to-day  mistaken  as 
to  their  real  creed.  They  have  inherited  the  doctrines 
of  a  pre-democratic,  pre-scientific,  and  therefore  su- 
pernaturalistic  age,  and  they  have  failed  to  detect  the 
fact  that  the  whole  of  our  modern  life  is  animated  and 
guided  by  inevitable  presuppositions  which  are  funda- 
mentally at  variance  with  those  that  engendered  the 
time-honoured  statements  of  the  ancient  Confessions. 
It  is  not  so  much  that  our  new  knowledge  of  the  facts 
of  life  has  made  it  difficult  for  us  to  believe  in  miracles 
and  in  the  arbitrary  providence  of  an  outside  God, 
but  rather  that  the  practical  exigencies  of  life  —  the 
concrete  experience  of  the  nations  of  Christendom 
through  the  centuries  in  which  democracy  and  science 
have  been  hewn  out  —  have  forced  us  to  act  upon  the 
assumption  that  there  is  no  intelligent  or  providential 
'\  interference  with  the  order  of  nature  except  that  of 
living  hiunan  beings. 


INTRODUCTION  xiii 

One  need  not  be  a  Pragmatist  to  see  that  it  is  experi- 
ence which  leads  to  the  discovery  of  truth.  I  do  not 
affirm  that  truth  is  merely  that  which  "works,"  or 
that  everything  which  "works"  is  truth.  No  doubt 
things  are  true  before  they  are  found  to  "work,"  and 
therefore  that  which  makes  them  true  must  be  defined 
otherwise  than  by  the  fact  that  they  do  so.  My  point 
here  is  only  that  we  are  led  to  the  discernment  of  truth 
by  the  exigencies  of  personal  and  social  Hfe.  Now,  we 
find  that  the  civilized  nations  of  the  world  to-day,  even 
though  they  still  pay  abundant  lip-service  to  super- 
naturalism  and  to  the  doctrine  of  miracles,  act  contin- 
uously and  unhesitatingly  upon  the  assumptions  that, 
apart  from  the  human  will,  nothing  ever  happens 
except  in  terms  of  the  law  of  causation,  which  is  coex- 
tensive not  only  with  all  actual  but  with  all  possible 
experience,  and  that  miracle  is  incompatible  with  the 
very  existence  of  human  society.  We  are  therefore 
entitled  to  say  that  these  two  principles  form  part 
of  the  real  creed  of  Christendom,  and  that  the  day 
has  accordingly  come  when  everything  in  its  nominal 
creeds  which  is  incompatible  with  them  should  be 
extruded. 

Another  revelation  which  the  experience  of  the  ages 
has  at  last  brought  clearly  into  our  consciousness  is 
the  truth  that  moral  perfection  is  the  only  rightful  ob- 
ject of  human  worship,  and  that  it  is  equally  worthy 
of  unconditional  reverence  whether  it  be  embodied 
in  a  superhuman  person  whose  power  is  infinite,  or 


XIV  INTRODUCTION 

in  the  feeblest  and  least  fortunately  circumstanced  of 
human  beings.  This  teaching  is  not  so  much  a  new 
theory  which  innovating  liberal  Churches  (like  the 
Ethical  Societies)  have  reached  by  a  process  of  abstract 
reasoning,  as  a  regulative  principle  which  does  actually 
animate  all  the  moral  judgments,  even  of  those  whose 
formal  theology  repudiates  it.  It  is  of  the  essence  not 
only  of  morahty  but  of  democracy.  The  doctrine  of 
human  equality,  which,  in  a  Republic  like  the  United 
States,  is  universally  accepted,  can  never  be  justified 
except  upon  this  inevitable  practical  assumption.  The 
Ethical  Societies,  therefore,  in  asserting  the  supremacy 
of  the  Moral  Ideal  as  "  God  above  all  gods  worshipped 
of  all  nations,''  and  in  declaring  that  no  being,  natural 
or  supernatural,  human  or  superhuman,  is  to  receive 
worship  except  because  and  in  so  far  as  it  embodies  and 
illustrates  the  Moral  Ideal,  are  but  giving  expression 
to  a  truth  rooted  in  and  vital  to  the  essential  sanity 
of  human  life. 

It  is  in  the  light  of  these  two  principles  —  the  prin- 
ciple of  Idealistic  Naturalism  and  the  principle  of  the 
Supremacy  of  Ethics  —  that  I  have  re-examined  the 
special  problems  dealt  with  by  the  writers  and  think- 
ers whose  works  I  have  used  as  texts. 

I  shall  probably  not  be  called  upon  to  defend  myself 
against  the  charge  of  theological  conservatism.  On  the 
other  hand,  the  conclusions  as  to  social  ethics  which  1 
have  set  forth  (especially  in  connection  with  the  ques- 
tions of  Suicide  and  of  Marriage  and  Divorce)  may 


INTRODUCTION  xv 

incur  the  accusation  of  moral  unprogressiveness.  I 
shall  not  shrink  from  this  imputation,  provided  only 
that  those  who  make  it  will  do  me  the  justice  to  re- 
member that  my  conclusions  are  in  each  case  based 
upon  experience,  and  not  upon  ecclesiastical  authority. 
It  is  my  conviction  that  a  revaluation  of  moral  values, 
such  as  Nietzsche  planned  but  never  achieved,  does 
not  necessarily  lead  to  a  transvaluation  or  disvaluation 
of  them;  for  I  hold  that  many  social  standards  and  in- 
stitutions which  to-day  are  assailed  as  obsolete,  merely 
because  they  are  commonly  justified  on  supernaturalis- 
tic  or  other  imverifiable  principles,  are,  really  rooted 
in  the  instinctive  moral  wisdom  of  man,  and  that  the 
intellectualistic  justifications  offered  for  them  were 
invented  ex  post  facto.  If  so,  these  standards  and  in- 
stitutions do  not  fall  with  their  old  defences;  but  it 
does  become  necessary  to  find  for  them  a  new  theoreti- 
cal justification,  founded  in  the  unassailable  truths  of 
universal  experience.  It  is  also  necessary  to  distinguish 
whether  admitted  evils,  associated  with  them,  are  in- 
herent or  due  to  adventitious  causes;  since  in  the  latter 
case  the  evils  can  be  cured  without  tampering  with 
the  essential  principles  of  the  institutions  affected  by 
them. 

The  teaching  of  this  book  represents  my  own  at- 
tempt to  apply  the  principles  of  the  Ethical  Movement 
to  certain  specific  religious  and  social  issues.  For  the 
faults  and  errors  which  it  contains  I  am  alone  respon- 
sible, but  whatever  in  it  is  sound  and  good  I  owe  to  my 


xvi  INTRODUCTION 

teachers  and  colleagues  in  that  movement,  whose  influ- 
ence through  many  years,  both  in  England  and  in  this 
country,  has  been  to  me  an  inexpressible  blessing.  It  is 
not  only  a  duty  but  a  delight  to  me  to  mention  espe- 
cially in  this  connection  the  name  of  Dr.  Stanton  Coit, 
to  whom,  after  eight  years  of  daily  intercourse,  my  debt 
is  so  inexhaustible  that  it  sometimes  seems  as  though 
I  had  not  a  single  idea,  aspiration  or  hope  which  was 
not  the  outgrowth  of  my  association  with  him.  Who- 
ever reads  his  book  on  "The  Soul  of  America,"  or  looks 
through  the  vast  anthology  of  Ethical  scripture  and 
psalmody  which  he  has  published  under  the  title  of 
"Social  Worship,"  will  readily  detect  the  depth  and 
breadth  of  my  obligations  to  him.  Nor  can  I  deny  my- 
self the  pleasure  of  acknowledging  with  equal  grati- 
tude the  spiritual  quickening  and  mental  clarification 
which  I  owe  to  Professor  Felix  Adler,  the  founder  of 
the  first  Ethical  Society  and  of  the  international  Ethi- 
cal Movement.  These  two  leaders,  moreover,  would  be 
the  first  to  admit  that  their  thought  has  neither  come 
to  them  unmediated  from  the  infinite  nor  been  evolved 
by  themselves  a  priori,  but  is  the  mature  expression 
of  a  social  wisdom,  growing  out  of  their  protracted 
contact  with  life  in  general,  and  especially  with  the 
organized  groups  to  which  they  minister. 

My  book,  accordingly  (although  the  censure  of  its 
defects  will  rightly  fall  exclusively  on  myself),  is  in  es- 
sence no  mere  individual  utterance,  but  aspires  to  give 
voice  to  a  growing  synthesis  of  the  common  wisdom 


INTRODUCTION  xvii 

of  a  group  of  men  and  women  who,  sensitive  to  the 
spiritual  trend  of  our  age,  have  sought  to  give  ex- 
pression both  to  its  needs  and  to  its  quickening  in- 
spirations, in  order  that  the  needs  may  be  met  and 
that  the  inspirations,  becoming  incarnate  in  the  con- 
scious will  and  purpose  of  mankind,  may  be  made 
more  potent  and  ejffective  for  the  healing  of  the  na- 
tions. 

I  take  this  opportunity  of  thanking  my  old  friend 
and  colleague  Mr.  G.  E.  O'Dell  for  his  help  in  reading 
the  proofs  of  this  book,  and  for  many  valuable  criti- 
cisms and  suggestions. 

H.  J.  B. 

Chicago,  III.,  May  s,  1914. 


CRITICISMS  OF  LIFE 

CHAPTER  I 

FRANCIS  Thompson's  "the  hound  of  heaven": 

A   STUDY  IN  RELIGIOUS  EXPERIENCE 

Every  preacher  profits  by  the  comments  of  friends 
upon  his  choice  of  themes.  When,  some  time  since,  I 
announced  a  sermon  on  "The  Hoimd  of  Heaven,''  one 
gentleman  told  me  that  he  was  at  a  loss  to  conceive 
how  I  could  find  in  the  poem  material  for  a  discourse. 
Another,  a  man  of  immense  reading  and  of  delicate 
literary  and  poetic  taste,  declared  that,  apart  from  its 
amazing  richness  of  imagery  and  witchery  of  expres- 
sion, he  could  see  nothing  in  "The  Hound  of  Heaven" 
except  a  deep  and  bitter  sorrow. 

These  friends  will  pardon  me  for  saying  that  their 
judgment  betrays  a  singular  obsession .\  It  proves  that 
they,  like  the  mass  of  the  uninitiated,  are  still  under 
the  hypnotic  spell  of  the  idea  that  religious  experience 
is  dependent  upon,  and  inextricably  boimd  up  with, 
supernaturalistic  theories  of  the  nature,  environment 
and  destiny  of  the  human  soul./ In  spite  of  the  re- 
searches into  religious  psychology  which  in  recent 
years  have  enriched  Anglo-American  literature,  —  in 
spite  of  the  work  of  Leuba,  Starbuck,  James  and  the 


a  CRiTieiSMS   OF   LIFE 

rest,  —  men  continue  to  regard  certain  type^jof  spirit- 
ual life  as  possible  of  manifestation  ^inlyjiLX^Ti jnnr- 
tion  with  doctrines  which  are  rapidly  and  deservedly 
losing  their  gri^J)^  ^1^^  mind  a^d  wiVW^f  men.  The  im- 
plied conclusion  —  that,  if  this  connection  exists,  then 
mankind  must  for  the  future  be  deprived  of  blessed 
and  exalting  experiences  which  in  the  past  have  trans- 
formed lives  and  inspired  mighty  deeds  and  marvel- 
lous literature  —  is  one  that  they  either  refuse  to  face 
or  submit  to  as  inevitable,  even  if  regrettable.^) 

The  premise,  however,  is  false;  and  the  conclusion  is 
accordingly  baseless.  The  error  involved  in  both  will 
become  apparent  if  we  recall  to  mind  two  self-evident 
facts  which  we  ordinarily  forget. 

The  first  is  this:  that  all  human  beings,  whatever 
their  variations  of  ancestry,  tradition,  language  and 
immediate  environment  (psychical  and  physical),  par- 
ticipate in  a  commion  nature  and  form  part  of  the  same 
universe  of  actual  and  possible  experience.  Their  iden- 
tity is  deeper  and  wider  than  their  difference.  Unless 
we  have  carried  pragmatism  to  the  length  of  solip- 
sism (the  philosophical  synonym  for  insanity),  we  can 
neither  deny  the  multiplicity  of  minds  in  touch  with 
a  common  reaHty,  nor  believe  that  the  differences  in 
men's  interpretations  of  the  world  correspond  to  actual 
differences  in  it.  For  example,  if  one  man  says  that 
animal  species  were  each  separately  originated  by  a 
superhuman  fiat,  and  another  that  their  differentia- 
tion is  due  only  to  efficient  causes  traceable  in  hered- 


THE  HOUND   OF   HEAVEN  3 

ity  and  environment,  we  agree  that  both  cannot  be 
right.  By  one  or  both  of  them,  the  facts  must  have 
been  misinterpreted,  or  elements  of  explanatory  the- 
ory unwarranted  by  the  data  introduced. 

The  second  self-evident  proposition  is  that,  just  as 
reality  does  not  vary  with  the  varying  theories  of  dif- 
ferent minds,  so  neither  does  it  alter  in  correspondence 
with  change  in  the  particular  theories  successively 
held  by  any  individual  person.  "Things  are  what  they 
are"  for  rationality  in  general,  not  necessarily  for  your 
or  my  individual  consciousness. {[Experience  precedes 
interpretation,  and  is  common  and  constant  where 
interpretations  differ.'}  The  mutually  exclusive  state- 
ments that  the  sun  goes  round  the  earth  and  that  the 
earth  goes  round  the  sun  are  relative  to  an  experience 
which  is  the  same  for  both  theorists.  Or,  again,  I  may 
interpret  the  thoughts,  feelings  and  voHtions  in  my 
mind  as  due  to  my  conscious  and  sub-conscious  self- 
activity;  another  will  account  for  them  by  the  sugges- 
tions of  disembodied  spirits,  who  practise  upon  me 
without  my  knowledge.  For  both  of  us  the  data  will  be 
the  same,  and  we  shall  agree  that  the  difference  exists 
only  in  our  interpretations. 

But  if  this  be  so  in  general,  how  can  we  suppose  that 
the  case  of  religious  experience  stands  unique  and  soli- 
tary in  the  world?  Why  in  this  one  instance  should  the 
otherwise  universal  rule  be  reversed,  and  theory  pre- 
cede and  beget  that  which  it  interprets  ?  If  in  every 
other  department  of  our  mental  life  we  find  that  the 


4  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

elements  of  fact  are  constant  and  only  their  theoretical 
counterpart  in  consciousness  variable,  are  we  not  pos- 
tulating unawares  a  stupendous  miracle  when  we  af- 
firm that  in  religion  there  are  as  many  different  kinds 
of  experience  as  there  are  theories,  and  no  possibility 
of  experience  where  there  is  no  theory  ? 

Surely,  in  regard  to  the  life  of  religion,  we  should  be 
led  a  priori  to  anticipate  that  there  will  be  no  complete 
and  unaccountable  difference  between  it  and  other 
fields  of  man's  contact  with  reality.  We  should  be  led 
to  expect  very  many  common  factors  in  the  actual 
experience,  together  with  many  variations  in  the  theo- 
retical counterpart  offered  by  different  persons  to  in- 
terpret what  they  have  undergone. 

This  anticipation,  based  on  our  general  knowledge 
of  man  and  nature,  is  confirmed  a  posteriori  —  by  the 
facts  disclosed  through  the  researches  of  modem  psy- 
chology. Consider  the  enormous  mass  of  data  which 
Professor  James  accumulated,  and  set  forth,  together 
with  those  he  had  borrowed  from  Leuba,  Starbuck  and 
others,  in  his  Gifford  Lectures  on  "The  Varieties  of 
Religious  Experience."  These  instances,  which  might 
be  indefinitely  added  to,  demonstrate  that  the  actual 
phenomena  of  religious  experience  are  the  same  in  all 
religions;  they  underlie  every  shade  of  belief  and  un- 
belief. This  statement  is  the  precise  opposite  of  that 
which  Mr.  G.  K.  Chesterton  falsely  accuses  some  mod- 
ern thinkers  of  making.  He  pretends  that  they  say, 
*'The  religions  of  the  world  differ  in  rites  and  forms, 


THE  HOUND  OF  HEAVEN  5 

but  they  are  the  same  in  what  they  teach."  Nobody 
except  Mr.  Chesterton,  the  supreme  genius  of  inaccu- 
racy, ever  said  any  such  thing;  but  scientific  investiga- 
tion has  demonstrated  the  fact  that  the  widely  differ- 
ing teachings  of  the  world's  religions  are  attempts  to 
account  for  a  common  experience,  just  as  the  ever- 
changing  opinions  held  in  successive  periods  by  scien- 
tific workers  are  based  upon  contact  with  a  common 
reality. 

A  man's  experiences  will  naturally  be  conditioned 
by  his  own  peculiar  balance  of  instincts,  sentiments 
and  emotions.  A  creed  (in  the  academic  sense)  may 
indeed  prompt  him  to  seek  certain  kinds  of  experi- 
ences which  without  it  he  might  miss.  But  it  is 
equally  certain  that  the  absence  of  such  a  creed  does 
not  preclude  the  possibility  of  the  experiences  in  ques- 
tion. In  any  case,  his  interpretation  of  them  will  fall 
into  terms  of  the  intellectualistic  theory  of  the  universe 
which  he  happens  to  hold. 

Until  we  grasp  this  elementary  fact,  we  are  shut 
out  from  any  scientific  or  humane  catholicity  of  ap- 
preciation ofsthe  world  of  religious  experience — that 
strange  and  obscure  chamber  of  reality  whence  come 
the  airs  from  heaven  and  blasts  from  hell,  the  joys  and 
terrors,  the  dumb  despairs  and  the  transfiguring  in- 
spirations, which  have  coloured  the  lives  of  some  of 
the  most  remarkable  figures  in  historyl  But  when  we 
understand  and  apply  it  rightly,  we  shall  be  able  to 
classify  together,  and  explain  by  the  same  scientific 


6  CRITICISMS  OF  LIFE 

formula,  the  religious  experiences  of  Catholic  Saints 
such  as  Augustine,  Francis  of  Assisi,  Francis  of  Sales, 
Catherine  of  Siena,  Teresa;  mystics  like  Meister  Eck- 
hardt;  Protestant  visionaries  like  Bunyan,  Wesley, 
and  George  Fox;  freethinkers  like  Shelley  and  John 
Stuart  Mill;  and,  last  but  not  least,  of  the  gifted  poet 
whose  tragic  career  and  untimely  death  we  are  led  to 
deplore  anew  by  the  publication  of  his  Life,  and  of 
his  collected  works.  ^ 

The  common  natural  elements  in  all  these  cases,  and 
indeed  in  any  possible  case  of  religious  re-birth,  could 
not  be  more  concisely  described  than  by  Professor 
James,  in  the  concluding  chapter  of  the  work  to  which 
we  have  already  referred.  He  sets  forth  the  process 
of  conversion  as  follows :  — 

I       Jt  consists  of  two  parts:  — 

[i    /     (i)  An  uneasiness;  and 

[j  /        (2)  Its  solution. 

'  /      (i)  The  uneasiness,  reduced  to  its  simplest  terms,  is 

/  a  sense  that  there  is  something  wrong  about  us  as  we 

/     naturally  stand. 

(2)  The  solution  is  a  sense  that  we  are  saved  from  the 
wrongness  by  making  proper  connection  with  the  higher 
powers. 

In  those  more  developed  minds  which  alone  we  are 
stud)dng,  the  wrongness  takes  a  moral  character,  and 
the  salvation  takes  a  mystical  tinge.  I  think  we  shall 
keep  well  within  the  limits  of  what  is  common  to  all 

1  The  Life  of  Francis  Thompson,  by  Everard  Meynell.  The  Works 
of  Francis  Thompson.  Edited  by  Wilfrid  Meynell.  In  three  volumes. 
(London:  Bums  &  Gates,  1913.) 


THE  HOUND   OF  HEAVEN  7 

such  minds  if  we  formulate  the  essence  of  their  religioi^^ 
experience  in  terms  Hke  these:  — 

The  individual,  so  far  as  he  suffers  from  his  wrongness 
and  criticises  it,  is  to  that  extent  consciously  beyond  it, 
and  in  at  least  possible  touch  with  something  higher,  if 
anything  higher  exist.  Along  with  the  wrong  part  there 
is  thus  a  better  part  of  him,  even  though  it  may  be  but 
a  most  helpless  germ.  With  which  part  he  should  iden- 
tify his  real  being  is  by  no  means  obvious  at  this  stage; 
but  when  stage  2  (the  stage  of  solution  or  salvation) 
arrives,  the  man  identifies  his  real  being  with  the  germi- 
nal higher  part  of  himself;  and  does  so  in  the  following 
way.  He  becomes  conscious  that  this  higher  part  is  con- 
terminous and  continuous  with  a  more  of  the  same  qual- 
ity, which  is  operative  in  the  universe  outside  of  him,  and 
which  he  can  keep  in  working  touch  with,  and  in  a  fashion 
get  on  board  of  and  save  himself  when  all  his  lower  being 
has  gone  to  pieces  in  the  wreck} 

The  question  how  a  man,  passing  through  such  an 
experience,  shall  interpret  it,  depends  naturally,  as  we 
have  said,  on  his  philosophic  outlook,  or  on  the  theo- 
logical creed  he  holds.  The  scientific  student,  however, 
is  bound  to  discriminate  closely  between  the  actual 
data  and  the  theoretic  elements  in  the  subject's  own 
account  of  his  case.  The  business  of  science  is  neither 
to  accept  at  its  face  value  the  theological  or  philo- 
sophical explanation,  nor  yet  to  deny  the  reality  of  the 
facts  explained.  The  modem  freethinker  who  declares 
that  there  is  "nothing  in  it"  —  that  conversion  is  a 
mere  fiction  or  figment  of  the  imagination  —  is  as 
*  The  Varieties  of  Religious  Experience,  p.  508. 


8  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

widely  astray  as  the  primitive  believer  who  imagines 
that  every  article  of  his  creed  is  verified  by  the  transi- 
tion which  he  is  conscious  of  having  undergone.  It  is 
very  necessary  to  hold  fast,  as  a  clue  to  the  lab3n:inth 
of  religious  and  psychic  experiences,  to  the  almost 
platitudinous  remark  of  Fechner:  "Nichts  wirkliches 
kann  unmoglich  sein."  It  is  also  indispensable  to  re- 
member that  between,  let  us  say,  John  Stuart  Mill  and 
St.  Augustine,  or  between  Shelley  and  Francis  Thomp- 
son, there  is  no  difference  of  nature,  however  wide  may 
be  the  gulf  between  their  theories.  Thompson  himself 
has  well  said  that  in  modern  poetry,  "what  is  great  and 
good  for  the  non-Catholic  is  for  the  most  part  great  and 
good  for  the  Catholic."  He  need  not  have  qualified 
the  statement,  and  he  might  well  have  added  that 
what  is  actually  true  for  the  one  is  true  for  the  other. 
It  is  inevitable  that  a  man  of  stunted  or  starved  emo- 
tional nature  and  rationalistic  mental  tendencies,  who 
has  undergone  conversion,  will  give  a  prosaic  account 
of  his  experience,  which,  nevertheless,  the  dispassion- 
ate student  will  find  sufficiently  startling  and  interest- 
ing. Indeed,  such  a  man^s  story  may  turn  out  to  be, 
from  the  psychological  point  of  view,  all  the  more  use- 
ful and  informing  because  he  keeps  close  to  the  ground 
of  literal  fact.  This  is  what  we  find  in  the  account 
which  Mill  gives  in  his  "Autobiography"  of  his  own 
transition  from  despair  to  moral  reassurance  and  the 
sense  of  purpose  and  meaning  in  life.  As  this  remark- 
able book  is  much  less  read  than  it  deserves  to  be,  and 


THE  HOUND  OF  HEAVEN         9 

as  many  readers  might  fail  to  realize  that  the  account 
in  chapter  v  of  "  A  Crisis  in  My  Mental  History"  is 
just  as  truly  the  story  of  a  religious  conversion  as  St. 
Augustine's  picture  of  what  happened  to  him  in  the 
garden,  I  shall  venture  to  quote  it  at  some  length:  — 

From  the  winter  of  182 1,  when  I  first  read  Bentham, 
and  especially  from  the  commencement  of  the  West- 
minster Review,  I  had  what  might  truly  be  called  an 
object  in  life;  to  be  a  reformer  of  the  world.  My  con- 
ception of  my  own  happiness  was  entirely  identified  with 
this  object.  The  personal  sympathies  I  wished  for  were 
those  of  fellow  labourers  in  this  enterprise.  .  .  . 

This  did  very  well  for  several  years,  during  which  the 
general  improvement  going  on  in  the  world  and  the  idea 
of  myself  as  engaged  with  ethers  in  strugghng  to  pro- 
mote it,  seemed  enough  to  fill  up  an  interesting  and  ani- 
mated existence.  But  the  time  came  when  I  awakened 
from  this  as  from  a  dream.  It  was  in  the  autumn  of 
1826.^  I  was  in  a  dull  state  of  nerves,  such  as  everybody 
is  occasionally  Uable  to;  unsusceptible  to  enjo5nnent  or 
pleasurable  excitement;  one  of  those  moods  when  what  is 
pleasure  at  other  times,  becomes  insipid  or  indifferent; 
the  state,  I  should  thinks  in  which  converts  to  Methodism 
usually  are, when  smitten  by  their  first  "conviction  of  sin."  ^ 
In  this  frame  of  mind  it  occurred  to  me  to  put  the  ques- 
tion directly  to  myself:  "Suppose  that  all  your  objects 
in  life  were  realized;  that  all  the  changes  in  institutions 
and  opinions  which  you  are  looking  forward  to,  could  be 
completely  effected  at  this  very  instant;  would  this  be  a 
great  joy  and  happiness  to  you?"    And  an  irrepressible 

*  He  was  then  twenty  years  old  —  a  fact  which  the  student  of 
religious  psychology  will  note  with  interest. 

*  Italics  the  present  writer's. 


lo  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

self-consciousness  distinctly  answered,  ^'No."  At  this 
my  heart  sank  within  me;  the  whole  foundation  on  which 
my  life  was  constructed  fell  down.  All  my  happiness  was 
to  have  been  found  in  the  continual  pursuit  of  this  end. 
The  end  had  ceased  to  charm,  and  how  could  there  ever 
again  be  any  interest  in  the  means?  I  seemed  to  have 
nothing  left  to  live  for. 

At  first  I  hoped  that  the  cloud  would  pass  away  of 
itself;  but  it  did  not.  A  night's  sleep,  the  sovereign  rem- 
edy for  the  smaller  vexations  of  life,  had  no  effect  on  it. 
I  awoke  to  a  renewed  consciousness  of  the  woeful  fact. 
I  carried  it  with  me  into  all  companies,  into  all  occupa- 
tions. Hardly  anything  had  power  to  cause  me  even  a 
few  minutes'  oblivion  of  it.  For  some  months  the  cloud 
seemed  to  grow  thicker  and  thicker.  The  lines  in  Cole- 
ridge's "Dejection"  —  I  was  not  then  acquainted  with 
them  —  exactly  describe  my  case:  — 

A  grief  without  a  pang,  void,  dark  and  drear, 
A  drowsy,  stifled,  unimpassioned  grief, 
Which  finds  no  natural  outlet  or  relief 
In  word,  or  sigh,  or  tear. 

In  vain  I  sought  relief  from  my  favourite  books; 
those  memorials  of  past  nobleness  and  greatness  from 
which  I  had  always  hitherto  drawn  strength  and  ani- 
mation. I  read  them  now  without  feeling,  or  with  the 
accustomed  feehng  minus  all  its  charm;  and  I  became 
persuaded,  that  my  love  of  mankind,  and  of  excellence 
for  its  own  sake,  had  worn  itself  out.  .  .  . 

I  was  thus,  as  I  said  to  myself,  left  stranded  at  the 
commencement  of  my  voyage,  with  a  well-equipped  ship 
and  a  rudder,  but  no  sail;  without  any  real  desire  for  the 
ends  which  I  had  been  so  carefully  fitted  out  to  work  for; 
no  delight  in  virtue,  or  the  general  good,  but  also  just  as 


THE   HOUND   OF   HEAVEN        li 

little  in  anything  else.  The  fountains  of  vanity  and  am- 
bition seemed  to  have  dried  up  within  me,  as  completely 
as  those  of  benevolence.  .  .  . 

These  were  the  thoughts  which  mingled  with  the  dry, 
heavy  dejection  of  the  melancholy  winter  of  1826-27. 
During  this  time  I  was  not  incapable  of  my  usual  occu- 
pations. I  went  on  with  them  mechanically,  by  the  mere 
force  of  habit.  .  .  .  Two  lines  of  Coleridge,  in  whom 
alone  of  all  writers  I  have  found  a  true  description  of 
what  I  felt,  were  often  in  my  thoughts,  not  at  this  time 
(for  I  had  never  read  them),  but  in  a  later  period  of  the 
same  mental  malady:  — 

Work  without  hope  draws  nectar  in  a  sieve, 
And  hope  without  an  object  cannot  live. 

In  all  probability  my  case  was  by  no  means  so  peculiar 
as  I  fancied  it,  and  I  doubt  not  that  many  others  have 
passed  through  a  similar  state ;  but  the  idiosyncrasies  of 
my  education  had  given  to  the  general  phenomenon  a 
special  character,  which  made  it  seem  the  natural  effect 
of  causes  that  it  was  hardly  possible  for  time  to  remove. 
I  frequently  asked  myself ^  if  I  couldy  or  if  I  was  hownd  to  go 
on  living  when  life  must  he  passed  in  this  manner.  1  gener- 
ally answered  to  myself  that  I  did  not  think  I  could  possibly 
bear  it  beyond  a  year.^  When,  however,  not  more  than 
half  that  duration  of  time  had  elapsed,  a  small  ray  of 
light  broke  in  upon  my  gloom.  I  was  reading,  accident- 
ally, Marmontel's  "Memoires,"  and  came  to  the  passage 
which  relates  his  father's  death,  the  distressed  position  of 
the  family,  and  the  sudden  inspiration  by  which  he,  then 
a  mere  boy,  felt  and  made  them  feel  that  he  would  be 
everything  to  them  —  would  supply  the  place  of  all 
that  they  had  lost.  A  vivid  conception  of  the  scene  and 
*  Italics  mine. 


12  CRITICISMS  OF  LIFE 

its  feelings  came  over  me,  and  I  was  moved  to  tears. 
From  this  moment  my  bm-den  grew  lighter.  The  oppres- 
sion of  the  thought  that  all  feeling  was  dead  within  me 
was  gone.  I  was  no  longer  hopeless:  I  was  not  a  stock 
or  a  stone.  I  had  still,  it  seemed,  some  of  the  material 
out  of  which  all  worth  of  character,  and  all  capacity  for 
happiness,  are  made.  Reheved  from  my  ever-present 
sense  of  irremediable  wretchedness,  I  gradually  found 
that  the  ordinary  incidents  of  life  could  again  give  me 
some  pleasure;  that  I  could  again  find  enjoyment,  not 
intense,  but  sufficient  for  cheerfulness,  in  sunshine  and 
sky,  in  books,  in  conversation,  in  public  affairs;  and  that 
there  was,  once  more,  excitement,  though  of  a  moderate 
kind,  in  exerting  myself  for  my  opinions,  and  for  the 
public  good.  Thus  the  cloud  gradually  drew  off,  and  I 
again  enjoyed  life;  and  though  I  had  several  relapses, 
some  of  which  lasted  many  months,  I  never  again  was 
as  miserable  as  I  had  been. 

Let  any  student  of  psychology  compare  this  in  de- 
tail with  the  story  of  St.  Augustine,  or  with  Francis 
Thompson's  ^' Hound  of  Heaven,"  and  the  conclusion 
will  present  itself  to  his  mind  with  irresistible  force 
that  all  three  men  are  talking  about  the  same  thing. 
They  have  trodden  the  same  paths,  and  the  reality  with 
which  they  have  come  into  redeeming  contact  is  the 
same  in  each  case.  Each  has  discovered  that  the  good 
in  himself  is,  in  James's  words,  "conterminous  and  con- 
tinuous with  a  more  of  the  same  quality,  which  is  oper- 
ative in  the  universe  outside  of  him,  and  which  he  can 
...  in  a  fashion  get  on  board  of  and  save  himself  when 
all  his  lower  being  has  gone  to  pieces  in  the  wreck." 


THE  HOUND   OF   HEAVEN        13 

Let  us  turn  first  to  the  relevant  passage  in  the  "  Con- 
fessions''  of  St.  Augustine.  After  he  has  left  Alypius, 
when  he  is  weeping  and  groaning  in  spirit,  he  hears  the 
heavenly  voice  commanding,  "ToUe,  lege;  Tolle,  lege." 
He  returns  to  Alypius,  takes  the  scroll  of  the  Apostle, 
opens  it  at  random,  and  reads  the  text  on  which  his  eye 
first  falls:  "Non  in  comessationibus  et  ebrietatibus, 
non  in  cubilibus  et  impudicitiis,  non  in  contentione  et 
aemulatione;  sed  induite  Dominum  Jesum  Christimi, 
et  carnis  providentiam  ne  feceritisin  concupiscentiis."  ^ 
Returning  in  sudden  marvellous  tranquillity  to  Aly- 
pius, Augustine  shows  him  what  he  has  read,  and 
Alypius  immediately  points  out,  and  applies  to  him- 
self, the  words  that  follow:  "Him  that  is  weak  in  the 
faith  receive  ye." 

No  student  can  fail  to  note  the  comparative  triviality 
of  the  texts  which,  cropping  up  at  the  critical  moment, 
effected  the  change  both  in  Mill  and  St.  Augustine. 
The  latter,  prompted,  as  he  tells  us,  by  an  inner  voice, 
opens  the  Epistle  to  the  Romans  at  random,  and  reads 
a  text  with  which  he  must  have  been  long  familiar; 
Mill  declares  that  he  was  reading  Marmontel  "by 
chance."  One  cannot  but  feel  that  any  one  of  a  thou- 
sand other  passages  of  literature,  met  with  at  the 
appropriate 'moment,  would  have  produced  the  same 
effect;  for  that  effect  is  the  natural  supervention  of 

^  Romans  xiii,  13  and  14,  R.V. : "  Not  in  revelling  and  drunkenness, 
not  in  chambering  and  wantonness,  not  in  strife  and  jealousy.  But 
put  ye  on  the  Lord  Jesus  Christ,  and  make  not  provision  for  the  flesh, 
to  fulfil  the  lusts  thereof." 


14  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

calm  after  storm.  Nowhere  in  all  literature  is  there  so 
wonderful  an  account  of  a  protracted  period  of  spirit- 
ual struggle  as  is  contained  in  the  chapters  of  St.  Au- 
gustine's "Confessions,"  preceding  the  incident  in  the 
garden.  While  Mill  enters  into  no  such  minute  intro- 
spective analysis,  he  nevertheless  lets  us  see  that  his 
depression  had  lasted  for  at  least  half  a  year,  and  that 
it  was  so  serious  that  he  frequently  asked  himself 
whether  he  could  even  continue  to  live,  if  life  must  be 
passed  in  this  manner,  and  had  come  to  the  conclusion 
that  he  could  not  endure  it  beyond  a  year.  In  his 
anxiety  not  to  exaggerate,  moreover,  he  even  falls  into 
self-contradiction  by  minimizing  the  greatness  of  his 
salvation.  He  tells  us  in  one  sentence  that  it  was  only 
"a  small  ray  of  light"  that  broke  upon  his  gloom.  Yet 
the  next  few  sentences,  though  written  many  years 
after  the  event,  and  with  evident  self-restraint,  break 
into  an  emotional  enthusiasm  very  rare  with  the  an- 
alytic logician  and  economist,  and  amount  to  an  as- 
sertion that  he  passed  from  death  unto  life.  Truly 
an  amazing  effect  to  be  produced  by  *'a  small  ray  of 
Ught"! 

We  cannot,  in  any  ultimate  sense,  explain  these 
mysterious  moods  of  the  soul.  We  can  only  say,  in  the 
words  of  the  "Imitation,"  "Left  to  ourselves  we  sink 
and  perish;  visited  we  lift  up  our  heads  and  live."  Our 
inability  to  explain  the  matter,  however,  is  no  deeper 
here  than  in  any  other  case  of  natural  phenomena.  No 
scientific  explanation  really  explains  anything;  at  best, 


THE   HOUND  OF   HEAVEN        15 

it  tells  us  of  unifonnity  in  sequence,  and  enables  us  to 
anticipate  a  given  phenomenon  when  we  encounter  its 
customary  antecedent.  The  psychic  turmoil  of  reli- 
gious experience  is  just  as  explicable,  and  just  as  inex- 
plicable, as  the  transition  of  the  sea  from  storm  to 
calm.  Between  the  facts  of  outward  nature  there  is 
no  logical,  no  rational  nexus.  We  know  that  they  hap- 
pen; experience  shows  us  the  order  in  which  they 
happen;  but  why  they  happen  remains  a  mystery— 
or  an  idle  question.  They  are  never  logically  deducible 
from  each  other,  as  are  the  facts  of  geometry  from  the 
principles  of  mathematics.  Yet  this  in  no  wise  invali- 
dates our  scientific  generalizations,  and  renders  them 
no  whit  less  useful  than  they  would  be  if  the  phe- 
nomena followed  logically  from  one  another. 

We  must  not,  therefore,  allow  the  supernaturalists 
and  miracle-mongers  to  hoodwink  us  into  believing 
that  there  is  anything  more  marvellous  in  religious 
conversion  than  there  is  in  the  growth  of  flowers  or  the 
sequence  of  the  seasons.  If  —  or  rather  when  —  we 
become  able  to  state  and  control  the  conditions  imder 
which  religious  experience  always  occurs,  we  shall  have 
as  complete  a  scientific  mastery  of  it  as  we  have  of 
agriculture  or  mineralogy. 

We  have  compared  two  stories  of  conversion,  one 
that  of  an  ancient  Catholic,  the  other  that  of  a  modern 
freethinker,  and  found  their  identity  in  all  essential 
details.  We  have  seen  that  the  data  are  the  same  in 
both  cases,  and  that  only  the  theoretical  explanation 


1 6  CRITICISMS  OF  LIFE 

differs.  Or  rather,  it  would  be  more  accurate  to  say 
that  the  Catholic  saint  offers  a  theoretical  explanation, 
in  the  shape  of  his  theology,  whereas  the  freethinker 
is  content  to  state  the  facts  without  attempting  any 
interpretation.  Lest  our  parallel  seem  inadequate,  as 
applying  to  two  individuals  both  remarkable  rather  for 
philosophic  and  psychological  insight  than  for  poetic 
imagination,  let  us  turn  to  the  case  of  two  poets,  as  far 
apart  in  their  theological  doctrines  as  Augustine  and 
Mill,  yet  both  unconsciously  testifying  to  the  same 
kind  of  experience.  Even  Professor  James  never  dis- 
covered the  fact  that  Shelley  underwent  a  conversion. 
Yet  any  student  of  religious  psychology  who  will  read 
successively  Shelley's  "Hymn  to  Intellectual  Beauty" 
and  Francis  Thompson's  "Hound  of  Heaven,"  will 
have  the  same  overwhelming  sense  of  identity  be- 
tween the  experiences  testified  to,  as  arises  from  com- 
paring the  cases  of  Augustine  and  Mill,  or  indeed  any 
two  stories  of  conversion  within  the  limits  of  the 
Christian  Weltanschauung.  Thompson,  it  is  true,  de- 
picts himself  as  fleeing  from  the  celestial  pursuer; 
Shelley  apparently  embraces  it  on  the  first  challenge. 
After  telling  at  some  length  of  the  "imseen  Power" 
whose  awful  shadow  "floats  though  unseen  amongst 
us,  —  visiting  this  various  world  with  as  inconstant 
wing  as  summer  winds  that  creep  from  flower  to 
flower,"  he  proceeds  to  relate  how,  — 

Musing  deeply  on  the  lot 

Of  life,  at  the  sweet  time  when  winds  are  wooing 


THE   HOUND   OF   HEAVEN        17 

All  vital  things  that  wake  to  bring 
News  of  birds  and  blossoming, 
Sudden  thy  shadow  fell  on  me: 
I  shrieked,  and  clasped  my  hands  in  ecstasy! 

He  tells  how  he  dedicated  his  life  to  the  unseen  Power, 
and  calls  the  universe  to  testify  that  he  has  kept  his 
vow.  He  claims  that,  after  this  one  decisive  moment 
of  insight  and  quickening,  — 

.  .  .  never  joy  illumed  my  brow 
Unlinked  with  hope  that  thou  wouldst  free 
This  world  from  its  dark  slavery; 
That  thou,  0  awful  LoveUness, 
Wouldst  give  whate'er  these  words  cannot  express. 

That  the  effects  of  Shelley's  conversion  upon  his 
conduct  may  not  always  have  been  such  as  we  can 
conscientiously  approve,  in  no  way  weakens  my  con- 
tention. It  is  notorious  that  imder  every  religious  dis- 
cipline these  effects  are  often  unsatisfactory.  Even  in 
the  case  of  Thompson,  after  the  "following  feet"  have 
overtaken  him,  and  he  has  discovered  that  his  gloom 
was,  after  all,  "shade  of  His  hand,  outstretched  caress- 
ingly,'' there  were  many  incidents  which  caused  dis- 
tress to  his  friends,  and  pangs  of  conscience  to  himself. 
Yet  nobody  can  doubt  that  the  tone  and  level  of  life 
for  both  these  men  were  permanently  changed  by  the 
mystical  experiences  which  they  so  wonderfully  record. 
Shelley  at  the  last,  in  his  "Ode  to  the  West  Wind," 
implicitly  renews  the  proud  claim  that  he  has  not  been 
disobedient  unto  the  heavenly  vision.  He  speaks  not 
only  as  a  poet,  but  as  a  prophet,  who  indeed  feels  him- 


1 8  CRITICISMS   OF   LIFE 

self  despised  and  rejected,  and  yet  is  in  no  wise  uncer- 
tain as  to  the  authenticity  of  his  prophetic  credentials. 
He  still  believes  that  his  "dead  thoughts,"  driven  over 
the  universe,  would  have  power  "to  quicken  a  new 
birth."  Hope  may  be  extinct,  but  faith  is  not.  As 
much  as  Thompson,  he  had  come  into  vivifying  touch 
with  a  real  Power  of  goodness,  outside  himself  but 
continuous  with  the  good  in  him. 

This,  then,  is  the  position  which  an  examination  of 
cases  of  conversion  justifies  us  in  assuming:  that  the 
experience  of  all  the  converts  is  identical,  and  that  the 
Power-not-themselves,  which  enters  into  and  trans- 
figures their  Hfe,  is  always  the  same  Power.    Nor  is 
f  the  holding  of  any  special  form  of  theological  creed,  or 
;  indeed  of  any  creed  at  all,  a  necessary  condition  for 
!  experiencing  this  quickening  contact.    Whether  the 
\  convert  calls  the  power  that  saves  him  "The  Spirit 
I  of  Intellectual  Beauty,"  or  "Christ  Uving  in  me,"  or 
1  the  "Fugitive  Ideal,"  or  "The  Hound  of  Heaven,"  we 
jiknow  that  what  is  connoted  is  always  the  same  factor 
j  \in  experience.    We  know  this  scientifically,  just  as  we 
know  any  other  fact  of  nature.   Science  has  no  other 
criterion  for  discovering  the  identity  of  an  energy  man- 
ifested in  different  times  and  places,  except  the  twin 
facts  that  it  always  appears  under  the  same  conditions 
and  always  produces  the  same  effects. 

It  may  be  granted  that  our  psychological  investi- 
gation reveals  the  identity  of  the  saving  factor  which 
enters  into  the  lives  of  men  of  all  creeds  and  of  none; 


THE   HOUND   OF   HEAVEN        19 

yet  the  significance  of  this  fact  may  be  overlooked  by 
those  who  are  accustomed  to  thinking  only  in  the  con- 
ventional theological  terms.  Such  thinkers  may  not 
realize  that  the  admission  of  the  simple  psychological 
fact,  if  fact  it  be,  which  we  have  thus  defined,  annihil- 
ates for  ever  the  pretension  that  any  supernaturalistic 
doctrine  —  Catholic,  "Episcopalian,"  Methodist  or 
any  other  —  is  necessary  to  salvation.  If  men  like 
Mill  and  Shelley,  whom  the  orthodox  world  would 
unhesitatingly  rank  as  atheists,  can  be  shown  to  have 
undergone  exactly  the  same  experience  as  St.  Augus- 
tine or  St.  Paul,  and  the  experience  in  their  case  led  to 
results  analogous  to  those  wrought  in  the  lives  of  the 
great  Christian  saints,  it  becomes  self-evident  that  the 
doctrinal  machinery  for  bringing  the  individual  soul 
into  contact  with  the  redeeming  power  is  in  no  wise  in- 
dispensable. This  conclusion  may  be  unwelcome  to  the 
dogmatist,  but  it  will  be  hailed  with  joy  by  all  who  feel 
not  only  that  the  world  is  passing  away  from  the  ortho- 
dox postulates,  but  that,  by  every  canon  of  intellectual 
integrity,  it  ought  to  do  so.  The  ecclesiastical  condi- 
tions of  salvation  are  for  many  of  us  intellectually  and 
morally  impossible  ones.  We  cannot  believe  to  order, 
and  we  cannot  believe  either  in  the  absence  of  historical 
evidence  or  in  defiance  of  such  evidence  as  we  have. 
If  a  man  of  modern  education  cannot  undergo  con- 
version except  he  believe  in  the  physical  resurrection 
of  Jesus  Christ,  or  in  the  continued  self-conscious  exist- 
ence of  the  individualized  personaUty  of  Jesus  Christ 


V 

\ 


20  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

after  death,  then  conversion  is  impossible  for  him; 
he  is,  as  we  said  at  the  outset,  excluded  from  an  in- 
finitely precious  and  exalting  experience.  If,  on  the 
other  hand,  we  can  show  actual  cases  of  men  who,  hold- 
ing no  such  beliefs,  have  yet  entered  into  this  saving 
experience,  we  have  conclusively  demonstrated  the 
superfluousness  of  the  ecclesiastical  doctrine. 

The  principle  that  "Nothing  real  can  be  impossible " 
is  thus  seen  to  be  a  two-edged  sword.  It  forces  us  to 
admit  the  reality  of  many  abnormal  experiences  under 
the  Christian  theory  which  the  iconoclastic  free- 
thinker is  disposed  to  reject  with  contemptuous  in- 
credulity. On  the  other  hand,  it  compels  the  Christian 
dogmatist  to  concede  that  his  dogma  is  no  condition 
sine  qua  non  for  the  occurrence  of  such  experiences. 

A  careful  investigation,  conducted  with  all  the  rigor- 
ous precautions  of  scientific  psychology,  will,  we  be- 
lieve, demonstrate  that  religious  experience  of  the  kind 
of  which  St.  Paul  and  St.  Augustine  are  classic  in- 
stances, is  much  less  rare  than  we  commonly  imagine 
it  to  be.  If  the  factors  involved  are  natural  and  normal 
in  human  experience,  it  seems  probable  that  many 
people  will  pass  through  just  such  transformations, 
though,  owing  to  their  unawareness  of  the  kinship 
of  their  own  cases  with  those  of  the  great  spiritual 
geniuses,  they  may  never  say  or  even  know  that  they 
have  experienced  conversion.  Yet  the  essential  facts 
are  quite  plainly  imiversal  facts.  We  are,  in  simple 
truth,  all  dependent,  as  Matthew  Arnold  points  out, 


THE  HOUND  OF   HEAVEN        21 

on  a  Power  greater  than  ourselves,  yet  identical  and 
continuous  with  the  highest  element  of  our  selfhood. 
We  do  not  make  ourselves,  our  nature  or  our  circum- 
stances. We  cannot  explain  or  control  the  fact  that  a 
bodily  ailment  which  on  one  day  is  an  overwhelming 
obstacle  to  any  great  achievement,  is,  on  another  day, 
a  most  potent  incentive  to  the  attainment  of  our  pos- 
sible highest.  Energies  and  inspirations,  "facilities 
and  felicities,"  do  indeed  seem  to  come  and  go  inde- 
pendently of  our  volition.  "Unless  above  himself  he 
can  erect  himself,  how  poor  a  thing  is  man!"  This 
undeniably  applies  not  only  to  the  rare  spiritual  genius, 
but  to  what  James  calls  "the  Crumps  and  Stigginses." 
Equally  universal  is  the  experience  of  what  St.  Paul 
calls  "  the  war  in  our  members."  A  man  may  be  alto- 
gether irreligious,  he  may  be  entirely  self-centred;  yet 
even  he  will  be  sometimes  able  and  sometimes  unable 
to  do  what  seems  to  him  good.  His  ideal  may  be  an 
idol,  his  notion  of  good  may  be  sordid,  yet  he  will  ex- 
perience a  kind  of  rhythmic  alternation  in  his  power 
to  approximate  towards  it.  And  in  proportion  as  a 
man's  notions  of  duty  are  more  exalted,  in  that  pro- 
portion the  conflict  between  aspiration  and  achieve- 
ment becomes  more  apparent  and  more  unendurable. 
The  saint  who  cries  out, "  Oh,  wretched  man  that  I  am, 
who  shall  deliver  me  from  the  body  of  this  death?" 
is  giving  utterance  to  a  feeling  that  occurs  to  every 
man  and  woman.  Or,  if  we  are  forced  to  admit  that 
this  experience  is  not  quite  universal,  we  shall  at  once 


22  CRITICISMS  OF  LIFE 

see  that  the  absence  of  it  in  particular  individuals  is 
the  decisive  measure  of  their  spiritual  poverty  and 
shallowness.  He  who  does  not  know  what  it  is  to  miss 
the  mark  morally,  he  who  has  no  aspirations  that 
transcend  his  capacity  of  achievement,  and  who  never 
finds  the  wail  of  St.  Paul  echoing  in  his  own  heart,  is 
spiritually  deficient  to  such  an  extent  that  he  is  almost 
below  the  human  level.  He  stands  to  morality  as  a 
blind  man  to  colour  or  a  deaf  man  to  music.  Nay,  he  is 
even  worse  off  than  these,  for  these  are  at  least  aware 
that  there  is  a  realm  of  human  experience  from  which 
they  are  excluded,  and  they  do  undoubtedly  lament  the 
bitter  misfortune  which  shuts  them  out  from  it.  The 
man  who  is  morally  blind  and  deaf  is  unconscious  of  his 
condition.  He  sneers  at  the  alleged  experience  of  others, 
and  denies  the  reality  of  the  ideals  which  men  strive 
in  vain  to  attain.  He  has  not  even  risen  so  high  as  to 
feel "  the  desire  of  the  moth  for  the  star,  of  the  night  for 
the  morrow." 

The  experience  of  moral  inability,  however,  is 
scarcely  more  universal  in  human  consciousness  than 
the  experience  of  the  influx  of  moral  power.  Who 
is  there  that  upon  challenge  must  not  admit  that  he 
has  often  been  helped,  as  it  were  by  a  Power  outside 
himself,  towards  the  fulfilment  of  his  ethical  aspira- 
tions? Who  has  not  known  at  least  some  rare  moments 
when  the  ideal  flooded  the  spirit  with  strength  and 
joy?  And  the  strength  and  joy  that  come  are  al- 
most invariably  in  inverse  ratio  to  the  intensity  and 


THE   HOUND   OF   HEAVEN        23 

bitterness  of  the  struggle  which  has  preceded  their 
arrival. 

Yet  this  experience,  so  ordinary  that  most  men  never 
dream  of  classifying  it  as  religious,  is  essentially  iden- 
tical with  the  most  wonderful  instances  of  conversion 
which  literature  records.  Not  being  poets,  we  may  not, 
with  Shelley,  "shriek  and  clasp  our  hands  in  ecstasy" 
when  the  awful  Loveliness  reaches  the  volitional  springs 
of  our  nature.  We  may  not  envisage  the  challenging 
ideals  that  rebuke  us  as  the  hunting  of  the  soul  by  the 
Hound  of  Heaven.  And,  not  being  analytical  psycho- 
logists, we  may  not,  with  John  Stuart  Mill,  realize 
that  our  gloom  and  depression  are  identical  with  the 
Methodist's  conviction  of  sin,  and  our  deliverance  from 
them  one  and  the  same  with  the  Methodist's  new 
birth.  Yet  reflection  and  scientific  comparison  of 
cases  make  the  fact  of  this  identity  altogether  im- 
deniable. 

But  what  is  the  Power  that  saves?  What  is  this 
thing  of  many  names,  whose  every  title  is  so  obviously 
inadequate?  It  is  the  Hound  of  Heaven;  it  is  the  Spirit 
of  Intellectual  Beauty;  it  is  the  voice  that  calls  to  St. 
Augustine,  "ToUe,  lege;  tolle,  lege."  Yet  such  imagi- 
native characterizations  are  clearly  not  definite  enough 
for  purposes  of  scientific  classification.  And  from  this 
point  of  view,  to  call  the  saving  power  "God"  is  no 
more  helpful  than  to  call  it  Xj  unless  we  have  succeeded 
in  evaluating  x,  or,  in  other  words,  in  defining  God  in 
terms  of  verifiable  experience. 


24  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

Our  analysis,  however,  opens  up  to  us  the  way  by 
which  such  an  evaluation  may  be  reached.  If  we  attend 
closely  to  what  happens  in  the  case  of  those  who  ex- 
perience conversion,  we  find  that  what  they  mean  by 
God  is,  in  the  first  place,  the  source  of  the  supreme 
blessings  of  life.  Not  only  so,  but  we  find  that  this  ulti- 
mate source  of  moral  strength  and  spiritual  peace  and 
joy  is  a  natural  as  distinct  from  a  supernatural,  an  em- 
pirical as  distinct  from  a  transcendental,  power.  In 
every  case,  from  St.  Paul  and  St.  Augustine  to  Shelley 
and  John  Stuart  Mill,  what  happens  is  clearly  the 
unlocking  of  the  hitherto  unexploited  resources  of  the 
man's  own  selfhood,  by  a  key  obtained  from  some 
other  human  agency.  There  is  no  instance  of  conversion 
unmediated  by  social  influences.  Even  if  a  man  sees 
a  heavenly  vision,  as  did  St.  Paul,  it  is  always  the 
vision  of  a  human  form;  and  the  context  of  circum- 
stance always  demonstrates  that  the  efficient  cause  of 
the  experience  is  the  stored-up  memory  of  what  that 
human  form  stood  for  when  it  was  alive  imder  the 
limitations  of  earthly  experience,  and  not  something 
which  it  has  done  since  its  withdrawal  from  within  the 
spiritual  organism  of  living  human  society.  When  the 
transformation  is  effected  through  the  reading  of  a 
sentence  in  a  book,  the  humanness  of  the  source  of  sal- 
vation is  still  more  evident.  The  command  to  abandon 
self-indulgence  and  to  "put  on  the  Lord  Jesus  Christ" 
originated  not  in  a  transcendental  sphere,  but  in  the 
thought  of  the  man  Paul.   Nobody  has  ever  claimed 


THE  HOUND  OF   HEAVEN        25 

that  Marmonters  "Memoires"  were  either  dictated  or 
inspired  by  any  superhuman  power.  Nor  would  the 
most  hidebound  dogmatist  dream  of  supposing  that 
there  does  actually  and  objectively  exist  a  Hound  of 
Heaven,  which  pursues  a  man  as  the  dogs  pursue  the 
fox.  Thompson's  Hound  and  Shelley's  Spirit  of  Intel- 
lectual Beauty  are  quite  obviously  objectifications, 
poetic  bodyings  forth,  of  a  mighty  ideal  which  haunts 
their  minds.  And  this  ideal  is  not  a  thing  which  they 
have  created  by  their  own  unaided  reflection.  How- 
ever great  may  be  their  own  original  contribution, 
they  have  received  from  others  —  from  parents  and 
teachers,  and  from  the  living  tradition  which,  through 
literature,  gives  a  timeless  life  to  human  thought  and 
aspiration  —  the  materials  out  of  which  they  have 
constructed  their  imaginative  picture  of  the  ideal  that 
haunts  them  and  will  not  let  them  go. 

It  is  necessary  to  emphasize  the  fact  that  a  psycho- 
logical investigation  of  religious  experience  definitely 
disproves  the  hideous  Calvinistic  (or  more  truly  Au- 
gustinian)  doctrine  of  total  depravity.  If  man  were 
totally  depraved,  he  would  necessarily  remain  for  ever 
ignorant  of  the  fact,  just  as  a  commimity  of  men  born 
blind  would  remain  unaware  of  the  existence  of  vision. 
Unless  there  is  something  in  a  man's  own  nattire  identi- 
cal with  the  goodness  that  is  outside  of  him,  he  could 
never  come  into  contact  with  the  larger  forces  of  spirit- 
ual strength;  for  he  could  never  recognize  goodness  as 
such.  This  truth  has  been  stated  once  for  all  by  Im- 


26  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

manuel  Kant  in  his  treatise  on  "The  Metaphysic  of 
Ethics":  ''Even  the  Holy  One  in  the  Gospel,"  says 
Kant,  ''is  only  recognized  to  be  so  when  compared  with 
our  ideal  of  moral  excellence.  .  .  .  Whence  this  idea 
God,  as  the  supreme  archetypal  good?  Simply  from 
that  idea  of  ethical  perfection  evolved  by  reason  a 
priori.  .  .  .  Imitation  has  no  place  in  morals." 

Into  the  metaphysical  question  whether  the  native- 
born  good  in  man  is  "evolved  by  reason  a  priori'^  we 
need  not  here  enter.  It  suffices  for  our  purpose  that 
there  is  an  original  goodness  in  man,  whatever  may 
be  its  genesis.  It  is  in  virtue  of  this  endowment  of  our 
nature  that  we  recognize  goodness  as  such,  whether  we 
find  it  incarnated  in  a  Hving  being,  or  objectified  in  the 
concept  of  a  superhuman  person.  It  is  also  in  virtue 
of  the  fact  that  goodness  is  the  fundamental  element 
of  our  nature  that  we  realize  the  inexhaustibility  of  the 
ethical  ideal.  We  see  that  no  one  man  can  ever  embody 
to  the  full  the  entire  possibility  of  goodness.  This  is  as 
true  of  Christ  as  of  any  other  historic  personage.  Deep 
and  real  as  our  sense  of  his  unsurpassed  greatness  may 
be,  we  cannot  for  a  moment  regard  him  as  more  than 
one  illustration,  one  hint,  of  the  possibilities  of  moral 
realization.  We  may  say  of  him  in  his  relation  to  the 
imiversal  ideal,  as  Mr.  William  Watson  says  of  the 
sun  in  its  relation  to  the  personified  totality  of  the 
physical  world:  — 

Thou  art  but  as  a  word  of  his  speech; 
Thou  art  but  as  a  wave  of  his  hand; 


THE   HOUND   OF   HEAVEN        27 

Thou  art  brief  as  a  glitter  of  sand 
*Twixt  tide  and  tide  on  his  beach; 
Thou  art  less  than  a  spark  of  his  fire, 

Or  a  moment's  mood  of  his  soul; 
Thou  art  lost  in  the  notes  on  the  lips  of  his  choir 

That  chant  the  chant  of  the  Whole. 

Nor  should  it  be  imagined  that  when  we  speak  of 
God  as  the  Ideal  we  are  in  any  way  invalidating  or  de- 
nying the  reality  of  God.  There  could  not  be  a  grosser 
blunder,  nor  one  more  disastrous  in  its  consequences, 
than  the  antithesis  between  the  ideal  and  the  real. 
People  talk  as  though  the  real  were  coextensive  only 
with  the  actual,  the  visible  and  tangible,  and  as  though 
anything  which  does  not  possess  these  attributes  were 
unreal.  But  if  —  without  going  into  metaphysical  con- 
siderations —  we  take  the  merely  empirical  ground  that 
whatever  produces  effects  is  real,  and  that  the  most 
real  thing  is  that  which  produces  the  most  powerful  ef- 
fects, we  see  at  once  that  ideals  are  more  and  not  less 
real  than  the  phenomena  of  the  sense-world.  Only 
that  is  unreal  which  does  nothing  and  can  do  nothing. 
Yet  nobody,  not  even  the  most  thoroughgoing  materi- 
alist, can  deny  that  ideals  do  produce  astonishingly 
great  and  tangible  effects  in  the  lives  of  individuals,  and 
of  human  society  in  mass.  It  may  indeed  be  maintained 
that  the  ideal  is  itself  a  mere  projection  in  conscious- 
ness of  material  things  previously  experienced  through 
sensation.  That  is  a  tenable  position,  —  impossible  as 
it  may  be  for  the  materialist  to  explain  how  physical 
facts  can  translate  themselves  into  facts  of  conscious- 


28  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

ness  and  standards  of  moral  valuation.  Yet  even  this 
explanation  by  the  materialist  will  leave  untouched 
the  fact  for  which  alone  I  am  concerned  at  the  moment 
to  contend  —  that  the  ideal  as  such,  whatever  its  gene- 
sis, is  an  actual  potency,  a  cause,  a  force  acting  upon 
the  mind  and  will  of  man,  and  through  these  producing 
effects  more  significant  than  any  merely  physical  pro- 
cess could  ever  achieve. 

To  say,  then,  that  God  is  the  Ideal  or  that  the  Ideal 
is  God,  is  equivalent  to  saying  that  God  is  the  supreme 
Reality.  It  is  also  equivalent  to  identif)dng  God  with 
the  human  and  natural;  for  few  would  be  disposed  to 
contend  that  an  ideal  which  is  our  deepest  nature  can 
be  at  the  same  time  supernatural  in  the  sense  of  super- 
himian.  Super-individual  it  undeniably  is.  Often,  too, 
it  is  higher  or  deeper  than  consciousness,  even  in  a  man 
of  whose  conduct  it  is  the  regulative  principle,  dom- 
inant over  all  special  passions  and  all  merely  self- 
centred  striving.  But  super-social  it  is  not;  at  least, 
we  have  no  experience  which  could  verify  the  assertion 
that  it  is.  Nor  need  we  be  concerned  either  to  prove  or 
disprove  its  transcendence  in  this  sense.  Its  value  to 
man,  its  preciousness  and  power,  are  wholly  inherent  in 
that  aspect  of  it  which  is  within  the  realm  of  verifiable 
experience.  Even,  therefore,  if  it  could  be  shown  to  be 
coextensive  not  merely  with  hiunan  rationality  but 
with  inconceivable  choirs  and  hierarchies  of  spiritual 
self-consciousness  beyond  time  and  space,  and  inde- 
pendent of  the  limitations  that  condition  our  mortality, 


THE   HOUND  OF   HEAVEN        29 

it  could  acquire  from  that  consideration  no  dignity,  no 
majesty,  no  sanctity  beyond  what  attaches  to  its  hum- 
blest manifestation  as  the  energizing  principle  of  good 
in  the  poorest  and  least  intellectual  human  being. 

The  view  of  God  which  I  am  here  attempting  to 
outline,  based  as  it  is  on  ethical  psychology,  and  built 
up  out  of  demonstrable  elements  of  experience,  is  a 
view  which  makes  atheism  impossible.  Or,  more  pre- 
cisely—  since  the  term  atheism  denotes  a  volitional 
rather  than  an  intellectual  attitude  —  I  should  say 
that  it  renders  impossible  the  denial  of  the  existence  of 
God.  Only  on  two  grounds  could  anybody  base  a  nega- 
tive argument  against  this  doctrine.  He  might  say  that 
no  such  comprehensive  inter-personal  and  super-per- 
sonal ideal  exists;  but  this  contention  we  have  refuted 
in  advance,  by  pointing  to  effects  which  presuppose 
such  an  ideal  as  their  cause.  Or  he  might  contend  that, 
inasmuch  as  this  ideal  is  built  up  out  of  volitions,  senti- 
ments, likes  and  dislikes,  and  not  out  of  purely  rational 
judgments,  it  ought  not  to  command  the  allegiance  of 
a  creature  like  man,  in  whom  reason  is  the  distinctive 
and  highest  faculty.  Here  again,  however,  our  answer 
is  not  far  to  seek.  We  need  only  point  to  the  fact,  ele- 
mentary in  ethical  philosophy,  that  the  discursive 
reason  of  man  has  no  place  whatever  in  determining 
the  values  and  the  ends  of  life.  The  reason  is  at  home 
only  in  the  realm  of  fact.  It  is  the  will  which  is  sove- 
reign in  the  sphere  of  values.  Our  moral  judgments  are 
ultimate  facts,  which  the  reason  may  classify  and  sys- 


30  CRITICISMS  OF  LIFE 

tematize,  but  which  it  can  neither  validate  nor  inval- 
idate.^ A  creature  all  intellect,  but  devoid  of  those 
instincts,  sentiments  and  emotions  out  of  which  con- 
crete moral  judgments  are  built  up,  could  never  come 
to  feel  the  constraining  force  of  any  moral  ideal, 
whether  apprehended  as  purely  abstract,  or  object- 
ified in  any  one  personal  incarnation.  But  man,  hap- 
pily, is  not  thus  constituted.  He  does  spontaneously 
love  goodness  when  it  is  set  before  him.  He  is  rebuked 
from  within  himself  by  the  clash  between  what  he 
does  and  what  he  ought  to  do.  The  "ought  "of  con- 
science is  irreducible.  The  reality  of  the  ideal  is 
proved  not  so  much  by  a  man's  conduct  as  by  his  own 
dissatisfaction  with  it.  Francis  Thompson  is  actually 
pursued  by  the  Hound  of  Heaven,  and  he  is  never 
more  conscious  of  the  pursuer  than  when  he  is  appar- 
ently remotest  from  it. 

The  special  temptations  to  which  Thompson  was 
subjected,  raise  anew  the  old  hard  problem  as  to  which 
type  of  character  is  of  greater  moral  worth  —  the 
man  to  whom  goodness  comes  easily,  who  does  the 
work  of  the  stern  Lawgiver  and  knows  it  not,  who  is 
not  embarrassed  or  deflected  from  the  right  path  by  the 
solicitations  of  the  senses;  or  he  who  achieves  good- 

1  That  is,  as  facts  of  consciousness.  It  is  not  intended  to  deny 
that  conscience  is  rational,  that  moral  distinctions  relate  to  objec- 
tive differences,  and  that  the  promotion  of  "the  good  of  all"  is  a 
commandment  of  reason.  The  contention  is  merely  that  the  ethical 
facts  could  not  enter  into  a  consciousness  which  was  devoid  of  will. 
The  perception  of  good  and  evil  as  such  springs  out  of  the  clash 
between  what  is  and  what  is  desired. 


THE   HOUND  OF  HEAVEN        31 

ness,  if  at  all,  only  at  the  cost  of  a  long  and  bitter 
struggle.  It  sounds  paradoxical  to  say  that  a  man  who 
only  abstains,  let  us  say,  from  drunkenness  by  means 
of  severe  and  heroic  effort  is  a  better  man  than  he  who 
never  feels  any  inclination  to  drink  to  excess.  Yet  it  is 
still  more  paradoxical  to  attribute  a  higher  degree  of 
virtue  to  him  who  has  never  known  temptation  than 
to  him  who  has  fought  the  enemy  at  its  strongest  and 
fiercest,  and  come  out  victorious,  even  though  not 
unscathed. 

The  problem  does  not  arise  in  the  case  of  the  un- 
tempted  man  who  is  self-satisfied.  The  most  repellent 
creature  under  heaven  is  the  moral  prig.  The  rich  man 
who  never  stole,  the  strong  man  who  never  drank,  the 
man  of  ascetic  temperament  who  never  felt  the  call 
of  the  flesh  —  these,  if  they  thank  God  that  in  such 
matters  they  are  not  as  other  men,  are  nearer  to  hell 
than  the  man  who  is  heart-broken  at  his  own  badness 
and  weakness.  Nor  is  there  any  question  in  the  case 
of  the  much-tempted  man  who  after  many  battles 
has  at  last  found  peace  in  self-conquest.  For  he,  having 
suffered  much,  has  learned  a  sympathy  with  human- 
ity and  an  insight  into  the  moral  needs  of  others 
which  fit  him  to  be  a  guide  and  counsellor  to  those 
in  trial,  as  the  untried  man  can  never  be. 

These  considerations  are  relevant  when  we  think 
of  the  tragic  element  in  Thompson's  life,  represented 
by  his  battle  with  the  fiend  laudanum.  Having  been 
indiscreetly  presented  by  his  mother  with  a  copy  of 


32  CRITICISMS   OF   LIFE 

De  Quincey's  "Confessions  of  an  English  Opium- 
Eater,"  the  unhappy  youth,  who  had  been  forced  into 
a  study  of  medicine  which  was  repellent  to  him,  took 
refuge  from  the  realities  of  Manchester  —  and  later  of 
the  London  underworld  —  in  the  dreamland  of  that 
soul-destroying  drug.  Of  men  so  tempted  as  Coleridge, 
De  Quincey  and  Thompson,  we  should  think  with  an 
infinite  sympathy,  thanking  God  not  that  we  are  not 
as  they  but  that  we  have  never  been  tried  as  they. 
Given  their  temptations,  we  might  have  proved  as  far 
inferior  to  them  in  moral  courage  and  strength  as  in 
poetic  genius.  And  nobody  who  reads  Thompson's 
prose  and  poetry  can  fail  to  see  how  every  temptation 
and  every  suffering  has  been  transmuted  by  him  into 
wisdom  and  literary  beauty. 

My  present  purpose  constrains  me  to  subdue  the 
controversial  impulse  awakened  by  the  staggering  as- 
sertion of  a  recent  English  critic,  that  the  author  of 
the  "Anthem  of  Earth,"  the  "Ode  to  the  Setting  Sun," 
and  "The  Hound  of  Heaven,"  was  not  a  great  poet.  I 
find  it  equally  hard  to  resist  the  temptation  to  dilate 
at  length  on  the  wonderful  qualities  of  Thompson's 
prose.  The  study  of  his  essays  encourages  a  man  to 
deny  what  the  world  at  large  accepts  as  a  self-evident 
fact  —  namely,  that  all  human  speech  is  divided  into 
prose  and  poetry,  and  therefore  that  whatever  is  not 
poetry  is  prose.  Even  M.  Bergson,  despite  the  rarity 
of  such  a  literary  style  as  his  own,  acquiesces  in  this 
vulgar  error.     When  that  amusing  philistine,   the 


THE  HOUND  OF  HEAVEN        33 

Bourgeois  Gentilhomme  of  Moliere,  is  told  that  such 
sentences  as  "Nicole,  apportez-moi  mes  pantoufles" 
are  prose,  he  expresses  huge  delight:  "Par  ma  foi,  il 
y  a  plus  de  quarante  ans  que  je  dis  de  la  prose,  sans 
que  j^en  susse  rien;  et  je  vous  suis  le  plus  oblige  du 
monde  de  m'avoir  appris  cela ! ''  Everybody  laughs  at 
his  simplicity;  yet  perhaps  they  who  laugh  are  sim- 
pler than  he.  At  all  events,  one  who  has  learned 
to  know  intimately  and  to  love  those  supreme  prose 
styles  which  are  perhaps  a  more  distinctive  glory  of 
our  English  speech  than  even  its  poetic  miracles,  will 
feel  disposed  to  contend  hotly,  as  I  do,  that  not  all 
speech  which  is  not  poetry  is  worthy  to  be  called 
prose.  If  the  "Areopagitica"  of  Milton,  the  first  book 
of  Hooker's  "Ecclesiastical  Polity,"  the  "Religio  Me- 
dici" and  "Urn  Burial"  of  Sir  Thomas  Browne,  and 
certain  quintessential  things  in  Jeremy  Taylor,  Edmund 
Burke,  Ruskin,  Walter  Pater  and  Francis  Thompson 
are  prose,  —  as  indeed  they  are,  —  then  we  deny  that 
the  thing  which  masquerades  as  English  in  the  columns 
of  our  daily  newspapers  and  constitutes  the  poverty- 
stricken  vocabulary  of  current  speech,  is  worthy  to 
be  dignified  by  the  same  title.  It  is  no  more  prose 
than  the  verse  of  Miss  Wells's  delightful  "Whimsey 
Aathology"  is  poetry.  M.  Jourdain  was  right,  even 
though  only  instinctively  so.  He  felt  the  gulf  be- 
tween his  talk  and  the  French  of  Montaigne,  of 
Pascal,  of  St.  Frangois  de  Sales.  Daily  speech  —  the 
language  of  the  newspaper  and  the  market-place  — 


34  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

is  at  best  only  crude  ore.  It  has  to  be  crushed  and 
sifted,  and  treated  in  a  hundred  ways,  before  the 
refined  gold  which  is  prose  can  be  extracted  from  it; 
and  then,  out  of  that  refined  gold,  are  cast  or  moulded 
or  beaten  the  ornaments  and  medallions  which  are 
poetry. 

There  is  much,  indeed,  which  hovers  on  the  border- 
line between  real  prose  and  counterfeit.  Many  times 
one  may  be  in  doubt  as  to  the  classification  of  what  one 
is  reading.  But  whoever  has  once  felt  the  wizard  spell 
of  our  "God-gifted  organ- voices "  will  never  again  be 
in  doubt  when  the  authentic  oracle  speaks.  It  is  not 
necessary  for  such  an  one  to  read  more  than  a  single 
page  of  Thompson's  "Paganism,  Old  and  New,"  or 
of  his  essay  on  Shelley,  to  realize  that  here  is  a  new 
incarnation  of  the  ancient  genius  of  English  speech. 
When  one  first  dips  into  his  pages,  the  sensation  is 
unmistakable.   One  feels 

like  some  watcher  of  the  skies 
When  a  new  planet  swims  into  his  ken! 

Thompson's  rebuke  to  the  authorities  of  his  Church, 
in  the  second  paragraph  of  the  Shelley  essay,  is  alone 
sufficient  to  settle  the  question  once  for  all:  — 

Fathers  of  the  Church  (we  would  say),  pastors  of  the 
Church,  pious  laics  of  the  Church:  you  are  taking  from 
its  walls  the  panoply  of  Aquinas;  take  also  from  its  walls 
the  psaltery  of  Alighieri.  Unrol  the  precedents  of  the 
Church's  past;  recall  to  your  minds  that  Francis  of 
Assisi  was  among  the  precursors  of  Dante;  that,  sworn 


THE   HOUND   OF   HEAVEN        35 

to  Poverty,  he  forswore  not   Beauty,  but  discerned 
through  the  lamp  Beauty  the  Light  God.  .  .  . 

Truly  may  we  say,  the  distinction  between  prose  and 
sub-prose  is  immensely  clearer  than  that  between 
prose  and  poetry.  Nay,  rather,  of  the  two  distinctions 
we  should  be  more  inclined  to  deny  the  existence  of  the 
second.  For  prose  is  often  only  poetry  at  her  ease. 
Take  this  exquisite  phrase  of  Thompson's,  that  Fran- 
cis of  Assisi  "discerned  through  the  lamp  Beauty  the 
Light  God."  There  is  far  less  poetry  in  many  a  score 
of  lines,  even  by  authentic  singers,  than  in  that  one 
perfect  gem  of  prose.  Nor  need  one  quote  the  prose- 
poem  which  comes  a  few  pages  later,  beginning  "The 
universe  is  his  box  of  toys,"  since  all  true  lovers  of  the 
supreme  in  letters  either  have  it  by  heart  or  will  pre- 
fer to  read  it  in  its  own  context. 

It  is  one  of  the  bitter  ironies  of  life  that  even  in  the 
case  of  a  predestinate  poet  like  Thompson,  his  sweet- 
est music  can  only  be  wrung  from  him  by  sorrow.  There 
is  no  fact  which  constitutes  a  more  unanswerable  ar- 
gument for  those  who  doubt  or  deny  the  almightiness  of 
God.  The  fact  is  undeniable:  Suffering  of  some  sort, 
mental  or  physical,  is  the  indispensable  condition  of 
supreme  achievement.  Milton's  anguish  over  his  blind- 
ness carries  him  up  to  two  of  the  highest  of  his  Hima- 
layan peaks  of  song  —  the  sonnet  on  his  blindness,  and 
the  invocation  to  the  Holy -Light  which  opens  the  third 
Book  of  "Paradise  Lost.'JNor  can  it  be  doubted  that 
the  insight  of  Thompson  into  the  deeps  of  human  woe 


^6  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

has  been  sharpened,  and  his  utterance  rendered  more 
poignant  and  memorable,  by  his  own  descent  into  that 
London  which  is  much  Uke  helWThe  glorious  outcome 
of  the  process,  however,  can  never  furnish  a  moral 
justification  for  it. 

Half  a  beast  is  the  great  god  Pan, 
To  laugh  as  he  sits  by  the  river 

Making  a  poet  out  of  a  man; 

The  true  gods  sigh  for  the  cost  and  the  pain  — 

For  the  reed  which  grows  nevermore  again 
As  a  reed  with  the  reeds  in  the  river! 

Mr.  Wilfrid  Meynell  has  disclosed  the  interesting 
fact  that  the  ''Shelley"  and  "The  Hound  of  Heaven" 
were  "  contemporaries  —  one  could  say  twins."  They 
belong  to  the  days  when  their  author  was  recovering 
from  the  deep  wound  of  his  outcast  period,  and  fighting 
his  bitter  battle  with  the  drug-fiend  and  with  the  harpy 
melancholy  which  the  struggle  brought  upon  him. 
^Francis  Thompson,  a  failure  for  lack  of  vocation  as  a 
candidate  for  the  priesthood,  failing  as  a  medical  stu- 
dent, failing  even  to  enlist  as  a  common  soldier,  a  ner- 
vous wreck  and  addicted  to  drugs,  wrought  these  two 
masterpieces  out  of  his  experience  as  a  dereUct  in  the 
streets  of  London,  when  he  sold  matches,  papers  or 
shoestrings,  slept  in  fourpenny  doss-houses  when  he 
;    had  the  money,  and  passed  the  night  on  the  Embank- 
1  ment,  "between  heaven  and  Charing  Cross"  (or  per- 
!  haps  we  should  say  between  Charing  Cross  and  hell), 
when  he  had  not?^  We  cannot  cease  to  marvel  at  the 
mystery  of  such  achievement  growing  out  of  such  cir- 


THE   HOUND   OF   HEAVEN        37 

cumstances,  even  when  we  realize  that  only  after  the 
reed  has  been  torn  from  the  river,  and  hacked  and 
hewed  by  the  great  god  Pan,  can  it  yield  up  its  hidden 
music. 

No  denial  or  qualification  is  possible  to  Mr.  George 
Wyndham's  dictum  that  the  essay  on  Shelley  is  "the 
most  important  contribution  to  pure  letters  written  in 
English  during  the  last  twenty  years."  It  is  bitter  to 
reflect  how  much  sooner  the  fame  he  merited  might 
have  come  to  Thompson  if  the  "  Dublin  Review  "  could 
have  taken  its  tiny  stock  of  courage  in  both  hands 
and  printed  that  essay  when  it  was  first  received,  in- 
stead of  rejecting  it,  and  bringing  it  out  only  after  its 
creator  had  passed  beyond  the  need  of  himian  help. 
Yet  perhaps  when  we  remember  the  hideous  official 
tyranny  that  reigns  within  the  Church  of  Rome  —  the 
malignity  that  pursued  the  great,  the  immortal  George 
Tyrrell  beyond  death  to  his  very  grave  —  we  ought 
rather  to  admire  the  hardihood  of  Mr.  Wilfrid  Ward 
in  publishing  the  "Shelley"  at  all  than  wonder  at  the 
timorousness  of  his  predecessors. 

We  would  add  to  Mr.  Wyndham's  assertion  the 
further  statement  that  the  essay  on  Shelley  is  the  best 
possible  commentary  on  its  contemporary  "  The  Hound 
of  Heaven,"  and  that  both  together  are  as  invaluable 
for  their  autobiographical  significance  as  for  their 
unique  literary  quality.  Reading  in  and  between  the 
lines  of  both,  we  get  perhaps  closer  to  the  central  self- 
hood of  Francis  Thompson  than  any  narrator  of  the 


38  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

facts  of  his  life  could  take  us.  Mr.  Everard  Meynell  is 
undoubtedly  right  in  emphasizing  the  personal  signifi- 
cance of  all  the  poems,  and  of  such  things  in  the  prose 
as  the  essay  on  "Darkest  England "  and  the  "  Shelley. " 
Consider,  for  example,  how  self-revealing  is  his  analy- 
sis of  Shelley's  childlikeness:  rTo  be  childlike,"  he 
says,  "is  to  know  not  as  yet  that  you  are  under  sen- 
tence of  life,  nor  petition  that  it  be  commuted  into 
death.'*  And  what  other  pen  could  have  drawn  such 
a  picture  of  Thompson  as  he  has  incidentally  given  of 
himself  in  describing  the  lot  of  Mangan:  — 

Outcast  from  home,  health  and  hope,  with  a  charred 
past  and  a  bleared  future,  an  anchorite  without  detach- 
ment, and  self-cloistered  without  self-sufl5cingness,  de- 
posed from  a  world  which  he  had  not  abdicated,  pierced 
with  thorns  which  formed  no  crown,  a  poet  hopeless  of 
the  bays,  and  a  martyr  hopeless  of  the  palm  ...  an 
exile  banned  and  proscribed  even  from  the  innocent 
arms  of  childhood  .  .  .  burning  helpless  at  the  stake  of 
his  unquenchable  heart. 

If  anybody  doubts  that  this  is  autobiography,  let 
him  compare  that  phrase  about  "an  exile  banned  and 
proscribed  even  from  the  innocent  arms  of  childhood" 
with  the  agonized  yearning  of  the  following  Unes  from 
"The  Hound  of  Heaven":  — 

I  sought  no  more  that  after  which  I  strayed 

In  face  of  man  or  maid; 
But  still  within  the  little  children's  eyes 

Seems  something,  something  that  replies. 
They  at  least  are  for  me,  surely  for  me. 


THE  HOUND  OF  HEAVEN        39 

I  turned  me  to  them  very  wistfully; 

But  just  as  their  young  eyes  grew  sudden  fair 

With  dawning  answers  there, 
Their  angel  plucked  them  from  me  by  the  hair. . . . 

I  have  said  that  the  indispensableness  of  suffering 
to  supreme  achievement  is  no  justification  of  it  if 
considered  as  part  of  a  world-plan.  But  religion  to-day, 
if  I  mistake  not,  is  no  longer  concerned  to  demonstrate 
(as  ordinary  theism  needs  must  try  to  do)  that  what- 
ever is  is  right.  The  true  religious  lesson  is  not  that  the 
entire  frame  of  things  is  ruled  in  wisdom  and  goodness, 
but  rather  the  clue  which  experience  gives  to  the  use 
which  we  can  make  of  suffering.  It  is  not  only  the  poet 
whom  the  great  god  Pan  hacks  and  hews.  We  all  have 
our  Gethsemanes,  but  most  of  us  bleed  vainly,  not  giv- 
ing back  to  mankind  in  character  and  counsel  what 
we  have  endured  in  suffering.  Turn  your  sorrow  into 
song!  Like  the  child  who  tied  his  harpstring  across  the 
bushes,  let  us  learn  the  secret  by  which  we  may  wring 
from  the  storm  its  music.  Let  us  not  waste  our  time 
in  devising  idle  arguments  to  explain  the  inexplicable, 
or  to  whitewash  a  world  which  is  once  for  all  indifferent 
to  our  heart-breakings;  but  let  us  transmute  the  heavy 
discipline  of  suffering  and  bereavement,  as  the  poets 
have  always  done,  into  some  grace  of  character  or  gift 
of  work  that  shall  help  to  redeem  others.  There  is  no 
truer  or  wiser  counsel  for  the  sufferer  than  that  given  by 
the  quiet  recluse  to  whom  we  owe  the  ^'Ecclesiastical 
Music":  — 


40  CRITICISMS   OF   LIFE 

If  thou  willingly  bear  thy  cross,  it  will  bear  thee.  .  .  . 
If  thou  bear  it  unwiUingly,  thou  makest  thyself  a  burden 
and  greatly  increasest  thy  load;  and  yet  nevertheless 
thou  must  bear  it.  If  thou  cast  away  one  cross,  without 
doubt  thou  shalt  find  another,  and  perchance  a  heavier. 

We  have  seen  that  the  spiritual  experience  testified 
to  in  "The  Hound  of  Heaven''  is  possible  to  all  men, 
whether  they  be  Catholic,  Jew,  Buddhist  or  Agnostic. 
Let  it  suffice  to  add  that  that  experience  is  also  neces- 
sary to  all  men,  if  they  are  to  have  any  elevation  of 
character,  any  spiritual  dignity,  any  true  valuation  of 
the  finer  ranges  of  existence.  Our  lives  will  be  indeed 
"strange,  piteous,  futile  things"  unless  we  too  be 
guided  and  goaded  by  the  mighty  Ideal  which  says  to 
us,  as  the  celestial  Hoimd  to  Thompson:  "All  things 
betray  thee  who  betrayestMe,"  "Nought  shelters  thee, 
who  wilt  not  shelter  Me."  Here  speaks  the  voice  of  the 
imiversal  spiritual  life  wfiichTs^  our  deepest  selfhood,* 
and  is  therefore  the  secret  of  all  worthy  achievement, 
ofall  alt  and  pueLTy,  ot  all  reformation  in  the  common 
me.  'i1SB  spiiiLual"  barreuiieas  of  our  day  is  due  to  our 
indifierence  to  it;  and,  in  so  far  as  we  are  overcoming 
this  barrenness,  it  is  only  in  the  measure  in  which  we 
are  hearkening  to  the  oracles  of  that  voice,  which  can 
always  be  heard  by  the  attentive  spirit.  So  indispens- 
able to  true  humanity  is  this  experience  of  the  Ideal 
that  it  were  better  for  any  man  to  be  awakened  to  it 
even  by  blinding  sorrow  than  to  remain  all  his  days 
at  the  level  of  sensuous  seK-centredness.    To  listen 


THE  HOUND  OF   HEAVEN        41 

within  oneself  for  this  voice  is  not  to  fall  into  the  mean 
idolatry  of  self-deification,  for  when  it  speaks  from 
within,  it  speaks  always  in  condemnation  of  what  we 
actually  are.  It  is,  nevertheless,  our  own  voice  —  the 
Universal  in  the  particular,  the  Man  in  men,  the  God 
in  Man. 


CHAPTER  n 

MR.   G.   K.   CHESTERTON  AS  THEOLOGIAN 

There  is  no  more  fascinating  psychological  problem 
in  contemporary  literature  than  that  of  the  spiritual 
development  of  Mr.  Gilbert  Chesterton.  His  numer- 
ous books  reveal  him  as  a  most  perverse,  yet  a  most 
lovable  man.  He  belongs  to  a  class,  traceable  in  Eng- 
lish letters  from  the  days  of  Chaucer  until  now,  which 
he  has  himself  defined  (in  an  essay  on  George  Borrow) 
as  that  of  the  "character."  He  is  a  singular  blend  of 
the  seemingly  incompatible  attributes  of  Sir  John  Fal- 
staff  and  Dr.  Samuel  Johnson,  combining  the  riotous 
good  spirits  of  the  one  with  much  of  the  practical 
sagacity  and  moral  sanity  of  the  other. 

One  is  struck,  at  the  first  glance  over  Mr.  Chester- 
ton's Uterary  output,  by  his  versatility.  He  has  turned 
his  hand  to  nearly  every  possible  branch  of  the  book- 
maker's craft.  During  a  comparatively  short  literary 
life,  he  has  turned  out  poems,  novels,  biographical  and 
critical  studies,  detective  stories  and  —  most  singular 
of  all  —  a  Christian  apologetic.  Nearly  two  years 
ago,  I  ventured  the  assertion  that  the  reason  why  he 
had  not  attempted  the  writing  of  plays  was  a  well- 
groimded  distrust  of  his  own  powers  in  that  direction. 
I  pointed  out  characteristics  in    his   novels   which 


CHESTERTON   AS   THEOLOGIAN     43 

seemed  to  justify  the  conclusion  that  he  could  not 
construct  anything  sufficiently  close-knit  and  sequent 
for  dramatic  presentation.  Even  a  superficial  study 
of  his  numerous  novels  reveals  a  singular  incoherence 
in  the  workings  of  his  fancy.  In  all  his  stories, 
from  "The  Napoleon  of  Notting  Hill,"  down  to  and 
including  ''  Manalive,"  one  is  impressed,  and  indeed 
oppressed,  by  the  chaotic  looseness  of  the  structure. 
Characters  appear  and  disappear,  incident  merges 
into  incident,  with  a  reckless  disregard  of  causality 
and  probability  which  makes  them  quite  incapable  of 
reduction  to  dramatic  form.  Hence  my  conclusion 
that  he  did  not  write  plays  because  he  could  not. 

Since  then,  Mr.  Chesterton  has  very  kindly  gone  to 
the  trouble  (which  must  have  been  considerable)  of 
proving  my  point  for  me.  It  is  no  unkindness  to  say 
of  "Magic"  that  had  it  been  written  by  any  man 
of  less  reputation  it  would  never  have  got  even  into 
print,  let  alone  on  to  the  stage.  And,  despite  the  at- 
traction of  its  author's  name  and  personality,  and  not- 
withstanding all  the  help  of  an  exquisite  stage  setting 
and  brilliant  interpreters,  it  was  such  a  failure  (even 
at  the  Little  Theatre  in  London)  that  it  would  have 
had  to  be  taken  off  after  a  few  performances,  had  not 
Fleet  Street  come  chivalrously  to  the  rescue  by  work- 
ing up  a  wholly  artificial  newspaper  boom.  Never  was 
such  a  set  of  mere  masks  put  through  such  a  series  of 
preposterous  situations  as  in  this  "fantastic  comedy." 

Now,  this  fimdamental  incoherence,  this  reckless- 


44  CRITICISMS   OF   LIFE 

ness  of  reality,  is  characteristic  not  only  of  Mr.  Ches- 
terton's creative  fantasy,  but  also  of  his  thought  on 
the  great  issues  of  life  and  destiny.  His  mind  is  that 
of  a  spoiled  child,  and  he  spurns  at  logic  as  the 
spoiled  child  at  parental  authority.  This  inherent 
defect,  moreover,  has  been  intensified  by  the  fact 
that,  Uke  almost  all  the  successful  literary  men  of  the 
present  day,  he  writes  far  too  much.  We  find  him 
every  week  in  the  "Illustrated  London  News"  and 
the  London  "Daily  Herald"  (to  which  the  allegiance 
lost  by  the  "Daily  News"  has  been  transferred),  and 
almost  every  month  in  almost  every  magazine.  Nay, 
one  cannot  always  open  even  that  grave  and  reverend 
Roman  quarterly,  the  "Dublin  Review,"  nowadays, 
without  finding  Mr.  Chesterton's  motley  jostling 
against  the  philosophic  cloak  of  Mr.  Wilfrid  Ward. 
Now  it  would  be  inevitable,  even  with  the  most  pains- 
taking of  craftsmen,  that  in  such  an  output  quality 
should  be  sacrificed  to  quantity;  much  more,  then, 
with  Mr.  Chesterton,  who  is  the  least  painstaking. 
Even  his  best  and  most  finished  work  —  even  the  os- 
tensibly mature  and  considered  judgments  of  "Here- 
tics" and  "Orthodoxy"  —  are  palpably  spoiled  by 
haste.  And  no  doubt  the  inadequacy  of  his  book  on 
Mr.  Bernard  Shaw  is  partly  to  be  explained  through 
the  necessity  of  complying  with  time-conditions  arbi- 
trarily imposed  by  a  commercial-minded  publisher.  In 
the  latter  essay,  as  its  victim  has  pointed  out,  a  whole 
chapter  is  spoiled,  and  the  entire  estimate  of  one  of  Mr. 


CHESTERTON   AS   THEOLOGIAN    45 

Shawns  most  important  plays  is  reduced  to  absurdity, 
by  a  "howling  misquotation." 

This  light-heartedness,  this  irresponsibility,  which 
leads  Mr.  Chesterton,  in  an  essay  which  he  must  have 
revised  carefully  for  the  press,  to  misquote  and  misre- 
present an  old  and  admired  friend,  will  naturally  play 
havoc  with  his  judgments  upon  men  and  things  towards 
which  he  stands  in  an  attitude,  not  of  sympathy,  but 
of  infuriated  contempt.  It  is  not  too  much  to  say  that 
the  tendency  towards  slipshod  quotation  and  scorn  for 
fact  which  seems  native  to  him,  and  which  has  been  de- 
veloped by  the  habit  of  hasty  work,  has  hardened  into 
something  like  absolute  incapacity  to  estimate  fairly, 
or  to  express  accurately,  any  point  of  view  with  which 
he  does  not  agree.  Take,  for  example,  the  following 
attempt  on  his  part  to  make  out  that  Ethical  Societies 
and  other  Uberal  churches  are  exclusively  composed  of 
futile  idiots,  lectured  to  by  their  own  kind.  On  page 
238  (American  edition)  of  "Orthodoxy"  the  following 
sentences  are  to  be  found:  — 

There  is  a  phrase  of  facile  liberality  uttered  again  and 
again  at  ethical  societies  and  parliaments  of  religion: "  the 
religions  of  the  earth  differ  in  rites  and  forms,  but  they 
are  the  same  in  what  they  teach."  It  is  false:  it  is  the 
opposite  of  the  fact.  * 

It  is  indeed  false!  After  an  intimate  acquaintance 
with  Ethical  Societies  extending  over  fourteen  years, 
both  in  England  and  America,  I  have  no  hesitation  in 
saying  that  Mr.  Chesterton  never  in  his  life  heard  this 


46  CRITICISMS   OF   LIFE 

moonstruck  absurdity  uttered  in  any  Ethical  Society; 
nay,  he  never  heard  it  said  by  any  sane  person  any- 
where. It  is  a  misrepresentation  so  huge  and  palpable 
that,  if  we  did  not  know  our  Chesterton,  we  should  be 
inclined  to  dismiss  it  as  a  deliberate  falsehood.  That, 
however,  it  is  not.  It  is  the  expression  of  intellectual 
wilfulness;  the  dictum  of  one  so  accustomed  to  substi- 
tute ridicule  for  fair  argument  that  he  can  no  longer 
distinguish  between  them.  He  thinks  that  religious 
liberals  ought  to  talk  nonsense,  in  order  to  make  them 
easy  game  for  him,  and  accordingly  (by  a  mental  pro- 
cess peculiar  to  himself,  and  therefore  indescribable) 
he  arrives  at  the  conclusion  that  they  do. 

The  defects  of  the  Chestertonian  Uterary  style  have 
been  pointed  out  by  many  critics.  Our  author  is  given 
to  riotous  exaggeration;  nine  times  out  of  ten  it  is  im- 
possible to  assume  that  he  means  what  he  says.  His 
warmest  friends  have  to  apologize  for  him  and  explain 
him  away.  In  the  London  "Spectator"  of  January  4, 
1 913,  there  appeared  an  able  criticism,  in  which  the 
judgment  was  expressed  that  this  blemish  on  the  work 
both  of  Mr.  Chesterton  and  Mr.  Shaw  is  so  serious 
that  it  will  debar  both  of  them  from  a  permanent  place 
in  literature.  However  this  may  be,  it  does  at  least 
constitute  a  serious  strain  upon  the  interest  and  at- 
tention of  the  reader.  One  grows  weary,  especially  in 
Chesterton,  of  the  perpetual  use  of  mere  verbalisms, 
of  antitheses  which  are  not  antithetical,  of  the  opposi- 
tion of  terms  that  do  not  exclude  each  other.  To  take 


CHESTERTON  AS  THEOLOGIAN    47 

the  first  instance  that  occurs  to  one's  memory:  Mr. 
Chesterton  said,  when  discussing  an  old  controversy 
between  Ward  and  Huxley,  that  the  dialectical  victory 
really  lay  with  Ward,  but  that  Huxley  secured  the 
popular  verdict  by  reason  of  his  greater  powers  of  liter- 
ary expression.  Mr.  Chesterton's  wholly  false  way  of 
stating  the  case  was  this:  "Ward  could  think,  but 
Huxley  could  write." 

This  absurd  opposition  of  perfectly  compatible  terms 
is  typical  of  a  thousand  similar  misjudgments.  It  is  as 
though  one  should  say,  "Ward  could  eat,  but  Huxley 
could  drink."  If  the  writer  really  meant  what  he  im- 
plies —  that  Ward  could  not  write  and  Huxley  could 
not  think  —  he  was  guilty  of  an  outrageous  libel  on 
both  of  them.  So  far  does  Mr.  Chesterton  carry  this 
tone  of  dinner-table  chaff  into  what  purport  to  be 
serious  literary  and  intellectual  judgments,  that  he  has 
no  right  to  complain  of  people  (as  he  frequently  does) 
for  refusing  to  take  him  seriously  or  to  believe  that  he 
means  what  he  says.  In  an  hour's  examination  of  his 
innumerable  essays  one  could  mark  in  the  margin  at 
least  fifty  things  which,  not  being  a  fool,  he  literally 
cannot  mean.  He  must  stop  his  buffooneries  if  he  dis- 
likes their  inevitable  consequences.  He  undoubtedly 
deserves  the  crushing  censure  passed  by  Mr.  Birrell 
on  the  style  of  Macaulay.  Macaulay's  style,  says  Mr. 
Birrell,  was  admirable  for  many  purposes,  but  it  had 
one  serious  defect:  it  was  not  adapted  for  telling  the 
truth  about  anything.  That  is  what  is  the  matter  with 


48  CRITICISMS  OF  LIFE 

Mr.  Chesterton.  He  has  many  and  admirable  powers, 
but  his  capacity  for  exact  accurate  statement  has  been 
so  long  abused  or  disused  that  it  now  seems  practi- 
cally destroyed. 

I  have  shown  that  he  sneers  at  his  opponents,  and 
substitutes  for  serious  argument  an  appeal  to  the  gal- 
lery. Let  me  again  illustrate  the  point  by  taking  the 
first  instance  that  comes  to  hand  as  one  turns  the 
pages  of  his  books.  I  open  at  random  the  volume 
of  papers  entitled  "All  Things  Considered/'  and  on 
page  189,  in  an  essay  on  "Science  and  Religion/'  I 
find  this  complete  demonstration  of  my  contention. 
Mr.  Chesterton  quotes  from  some  unnamed  exponent 
of  the  New  Theology  a  passage  to  the  effect  that  mod- 
ern science  had  shown  that  there  never  was  a  his- 
torical event  corresponding  to  the  theological  account 
of  the  Fall  of  Man.  He  comments  upon  the  assertion 
as  follows:  — 

It  is  written  with  earnestness  and  in  excellent  English: 
it  must  mean  something.  But  what  can  it  mean?  How 
could  physical  science  prove  that  man  is  not  depraved  ?  You 
do  not  cut  a  man  open  to  find  his  sins.  You  do  not  boil 
him  until  he  gives  forth  the  unmistakable  green  fumes 
of  depravity.  How  could  physical  science  find  any  trace 
of  a  moral  fall  ?  What  traces  did  the  writer  expect  to 
find?  Did  he  expect  to  find  a  fossil  Eve,  with  a  fossil 
apple  inside  her?  Did  he  suppose  that  the  ages  would 
have  spared  for  him  a  complete  skeleton  of  Adam,  at- 
tached to  a  slightly  faded  figleaf  ?  ^ 

*  Italics  the  present  writer's. 


CHESTERTON  AS   THEOLOGIAN    49 

Observe  the  jugglery!  —  and  remember  that  these 
are  the  words  of  one  who  has  presumed  to  enter  the 
lists  in  behalf  of  orthodoxy,  and  thereby  professed  him- 
self familiar,  at  least  in  general  outline,  with  the  doc- 
trines of  orthodox  theology.  The  writer  he  is  here  at- 
tacking had  not  suggested  that  physical  science  could 
find  any  traces  of  a  moral  fall.  Neither  had  he  suggested 
or  even  dreamed  that  science  could  prove  that  man 
is  not  depraved.  He  referred  to  evidence,  not  of  a  moral 
fall  of  man,  but,  explicitly,  of  an  historical  event  which 
by  orthodox  theology  has  always  been  alleged  to  have 
resulted  from  the  Fall  of  Man,  and  that  an  event  of 
which,  if  it  had  occurred,  physical  science  could  not 
have  failed  to  discover  abundant  traces.  His  context 
clearly  showed  that  he  had  in  mind  St.  Paul's  theory  of 
the  Fall  and  its  consequences.  Now,  according  to  the 
orthodox  doctrine  as  expounded  by  St.  Paul  and  as 
expressed  in  "Paradise  Lost,"  the  Fall  of  Man  was 
an  event  which  ^^  brought  death  into  the  world,  and  all 
our  woe.''  That  is  what  the  New  Theologian  was 
talking  about.  His  perfectly  plain  meaning  was,  that 
if  the  orthodox  doctrine  were  true,  our  science  could 
not  have  failed  to  verify  it  by  showing  that  at  a  cer- 
tain definite  epoch  the  phenomenon  called  death  first 
took  place  in  the  world.  What  physical  science  has 
proved  is  that  death  has  always  been  the  correlative 
of  life,  from  the  far-off  dawn  of  physical  sentiency. 
Now,  if  Mr.  Chesterton  does  not  know  that  all  ortho- 
dox Christians  have,  with  St.  Paul,  understood  the 


50  CRITICISMS  OF  LIFE 

Fall  of  Adam  as  the  cause  of  mortality,  then  he  does 
not  know  the  first  rudiments  of  what  he  is  talking 
about.  His  treatment  of  his  opponent  in  the  passage 
I  have  quoted  is  either  a  piece  of  elephantine  humour, 
or  else  it  reveals  an  ignorance  of  theology  which  for 
ever  disentitles  him  to  serious  attention. 

It  is  such  deliverances  as  these  that  have  produced 
in  the  minds  of  readers  that  incredulity  as  to  his 
seriousness  which  so  annoys  him.  The  only  possible 
comment  one  could  make  is  that  the  above-quoted 
farrago  is  barely  tolerable  if  meant  as  a  joke,  but  if 
meant  otherwise  is  an  unpardonable  misinterpreta- 
tion of  his  opponent. 

And  yet  it  is  with  theology  that  his  most  important 
work  assumes  to  deal.  It  is  true  that  he  diplomat- 
ically abstains  from  claiming  for  "Orthodoxy'^  the 
rank  of  an  ecclesiastical  treatise.  He  calls  it  "a  sort 
of  slovenly  autobiography,"  and  one  cannot  ascribe 
the  depreciatory  adjective  to  any  excess  of  modesty 
on  his  part.  His  book  is  by  no  means  an  ordered  argu- 
ment. In  it,  he  says,  he  has  attempted  ^*in  a  vague 
and  personal  way,  in  a  set  of  mental  pictures  rather 
than  in  a  series  of  deductions,"  to  state  the  philosophy 
which  has  enlisted  his  allegiance.  He  deliberately  omits 
the  only  really  vital  problem  —  that  of  the  seat  and 
credentials  of  the  authority  upon  which  the  orthodox 
repose  their  faith.  And  he  never  once  grapples  seri- 
ously with  any  one  of  the  formidable  forces  arrayed 
against  orthodoxy.  The  book  is  almost  as  negative  in 


CHESTERTON   AS   THEOLOGIAN    51 

its  effect  as  is  Mr.  Balfour's  "Foundations  of  Belief." 
By  this  I  mean  that  one  might  agree  with  almost  all 
that  Mr.  Chesterton  says  in  criticism  of  present-day 
philosophy  and  science,  and  yet  find  oneself  desti- 
tute of  the  barest  rag  of  a  reason  for  believing  in  the 
Apostles'  Creed,  which,  "as  understood  by  everybody 
calling  himself  Christian  until  a  very  short  time  ago," 
he  chooses  as  his  standard  of  orthodoxy. 
;  Such,  indeed,  is  my  own  position.  I  find  myself  in 
cordial  agreement  with  much  of  his  attack  upon  cer- 
tain unwarrantable  assumptions  and  certain  more  or 
less  obscure  tendencies  of  that  crude,  materialistic 
determinism  which  he  is  pleased  to  call  modern 
thought.  I  had  passed  similar  strictures  on  them  many 
times,  long  before  I  read  Mr.  Chesterton's  apologetic. 
But  he  omits  to  notice  the  important  fact  that  his  own 
criticisms  generally  apply  with  far  greater  force  to 
believers  in  the  faith  which  he  professes  than  to  the 
modern  so-called  unbelievers  against  whom  he  is 
crusading. 

In  his  first  chapter,  entitled  "The  Maniac,"  one  finds 
a  fafniliar  fact  of  abnormal  psychology  wisely  and 
wittily  presented.  I  will  not  dwell  upon  the  self-con- 
tradiction involved  in  his  contending  at  the  outset  that 
one  must  not  believe  in  oneself,  and  then,  in  the  second 
chapter  (on  page  56),  maintaining  emphatically  that 
one  is  bound  to  believe  in  oneself.  Let  us  rather  attend 
for  a  moment  to  the  proposition  that  "the  madman  is 
not  the  man  who  has  lost  his  reason.  The  madman  is 


52  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

the  man  who  has  lost  everything  except  his  reason." 
The  assertion,  of  course,  is  true  of  some  madmen;  and 
Mr.  Chesterton's  conclusion  that  the  materialist  is  in 
danger  of  becoming  mad  in  this  sense  is  quite  undeni- 
able. But  to  what  school  of  thinkers  does  his  warning 
apply  half  so  forcibly  as  to  the  whole  historic  succession 
of  the  theologians  ? 

Having  stated  this  truth,  Mr.  Chesterton  buttresses 
it  with  a  misstatement.  It  is  reasoning  itself,  he  tells 
us,  —  it  is  sheer  logic,  —  which  sends  people  mad. 
Poetry  and  art,  he  says,  are  entirely  compatible  with 
sanity;  but  ratiocination  is  the  road  to  Hanwell.  The 
truth  is  that  it  is  no  more  logic  than  it  is  art  or  poetry 
which  produces  insanity.  It  is  some  impaired  physio- 
logical correlative  of  consciousness;  some  defect  of 
brain  or  nerve,  due  to  strain  or  overwork  if  not  to 
heredity,  and  quite  as  likely  to  be  induced  by  exces- 
sive toil  at  art  or  poetry  as  by  over-indulgence  in  the 
logical  process.  And  the  peculiarity  of  the  maniac  is 
not  his  reasoning,  but  the  fact  that  he  reasons  in  vacuo. 
He  has  lost  touch  with  reality.  While  his  logic  may 
be  irrefutable,  yet  it  is  vitiated  through  being  based 
upon  untested  and  unverifiable  premises.  Doubtless 
there  is  much  akin  to  madness,  as  Mr.  Chesterton 
contends,  in  the  baseless  and  fantastic  argurnenta- 
tion  of  Haeckel  and  his  school.  Yet  if  one  wanted  to 
find  the  crucial  and  glaring  examples  of  this  kind 
of  derangement,  one  would  have  to  turn  to  the  theo- 
logians.   From  Origen  and  Tertullian  down  to  Jon- 


CHESTERTON  AS   THEOLOGIAN     53 

athan  Edwards  —  yes,  and  even  John  Henry  New- 
man —  one  could  find  a  depressing  procession  of 
thinkers  who,  measured  by  Mr.  Chesterton's  own 
standard,  show  every  mark  of  that  alienation  from 
the  world  of  normal  experience  which  is  the  diagnostic 
of  insanity.  The  Catholic  theologian  who  asserts  that, 
in  the  economy  of  a  merciful  God,  infants  less  than  a 
span  long  will  be  seen  crawling  on  the  floor  of  hell,  is 
the  crowning  evidence  of  Mr.  Chesterton's  contention. 
He  may  be  an  admirable  reasoner;  but  he  starts  from 
a  premise  which  has  no  relation  to  reality,  which  is 
unverified  and  unverifiable,  —  because,  luckily,  it  can 
never  be  reduced  to  terms  of  experience. 

After  contending  that  it  is  reasoning  which  sends 
men  mad,  Mr.  Chesterton  maintains  that  it  is  mysti- 
cism which  keeps  them  sane.  "As  long  as  you  have 
mystery,"  he  tells  us,  "you  have  health;  when  you  de- 
stroy mystery  you  create  morbidity."  Most  true !  But 
see  how  here  the  apologist's  two  -  edged  sword  has 
wounded  him  with  its  reverse  edge.  Who  but  the  or- 
thodox theologian  has  sought  to  destroy  that  mystery 
which  is  the  very  life-breath  of  sanity  ?  The  mystic  is 
the  man  whose  sense  of  peace  in  life  is  so  real,  whose 
acceptance  of  the  high  privilege  of  being  is  so  glad  and 
so  spontaneous,  that  he  willingly  embraces  it,  with  all 
its  unresolved  discords,  all  its  insoluble  riddles.  Or- 
thodoxy is  the  polar  antithesis  of  this  sane  mysticism. 
The  orthodox  theologian  is  the  man  who  cannot  en- 
dure, who  cannot  even  face,  "the  burden  of  unintelli- 


54  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

gible  things."  He  dares  not  think  of  the  world  until 
he  has  a  ready-made  answer  to  all  the  questions  which 
its  mystery  evokes  in  the  brooding  soul.  He  cannot 
be  happy  without  a  theory,  or  what  he  calls  a  revela- 
tion, to  explain  to  him  the  origin  of  things,  the  final 
goal  of  creation,  and  the  destiny  of  his  soul  in  a  life 
beyond  life.  Let  us,  then,  agree  with  Mr.  Chester- 
ton that  it  is  mysticism  which  keeps  men  sane;  but  let 
us  point  out  to  him  that  in  advancing  this  argument 
he  has,  at  the  very  outset,  clumsily  annihilated  the 
foundations  of  his  own  superstructure. 

His  chapter  on  "The  Suicide  of  Thought"  enshrines 
a  truth  as  evident,  and  as  important,  as  that  which 
lies  at  the  root  of  his  argument  about  the  maniac.  It  is 
perfectly  true  that  the  will-worship  of  Schopenhauer 
and  Nietzsche  is  anti  -  rational,  and  would,  if  com- 
pletely acted  out,  lead  to  utter  futility  and  frustration. 

But  here  one  encounters  what  is  perhaps  the  most 
unpardonable  trick  of  Mr.  Chesterton's  method.  He 
professes  to  be  refuting  modern  thought.  He  alludes, 
it  is  true,  to  Schopenhauer  and  Nietzsche,  but  in  a 
fashion  which  leaves  in  one's  mind  the  gravest  doubts 
as  to  the  extent  of  his  first-hand  study  of  them;  and 
the  one  representative  of  "modern  thought"  with 
whom  he  seems  really  familiar  (apart  from  his  friend 
and  enemy,  Mr.  Shaw)  is,  of  all  persons,  Mr.  H.  G. 
Wells !  This,  I  say,  is  the  unpardonable  thing,  —  that 
Mr.  Chesterton  should  base  his  indictment  of  what  he 
calls  modern  thought  on  the  tenth-rate  futilities  of  a 


CHESTERTON   AS   THEOLOGIAN    55 

stray  tale-teller  trespassing  in  the  field  of  philosophy, 
and  moving  about  in  worlds  that  he  has  never  realized. 
Mr.  H.  G.  Wells's  book  entitled  "First  and  Last 
Things"  is  of  a  nature  to  make  EngHshmen  blush 
for  the  intellectual  reputation  of  their  country.  It 
displays  an  incapacity  for  philosophical  thinking,  a 
blindness  to  its  author's  own  limitations,  a  readiness 
to  rush  in  where  angels  fear  to  tread,  which  can  only 
be  described  as  shameful. 

The  particular  absurdity  upon  which  Mr.  Chesterton 
fastens  as  an  evidence  of  "The  Suicide  of  Thought'' 
is  one  that  reveals,  not  suicide,  but  total  incapacity 
for  thought;  I  mean,  of  course,  Mr.  Wells's  serene  de- 
nial of  the  validity  of  the  logical  law  of  identity  and  dif- 
ference, —  a  law  presupposed  in  the  very  act  of  dis- 
puting it,  and  undeniable  save  in  virtue  of  itself.  If 
it  were  not  true  that  A  is  either  B  or  not  B,  then  it 
would  be  as  useless  for  Mr.  Wells  to  attempt  to  write 
a  novel  as  he  has  shown  it  to  be  for  him  to  attempt 
to  write  philosophy.  But  to  take  this  self-confessed 
vender  at  second-hand  of  the  sophisms  of  a  Cambridge 
schoolgirl  as  a  representative  of  modern  thought  is  not 
merely  Chestertonian  —  it  is  also  Gilbertian.  It  is  as 
ludicrous  as  it  would  be  to  take  a  Pastor  Russell  or 
a  ranting  street-corner  evangelist  as  a  representative 
of  Christian  philosophy  and  theology,  and  ignore  the 
master-minds  of  the  Church  — the  Butlers  and  New- 
mans, the  Hookers  and  Taylors,  the  Pascals  and  the 
Augustines.    If  Mr.  Chesterton  had  wanted  to  deal 


56  CRITICISMS   OF   LIFE 

justly  and  seriously  with  modern  thought  he  should 
have  joined  battle  with  its  real  masters,  from  Arnold 
and  Seeley,  let  us  say,  down  to  Green  and  Sidgwick, 
James  and  Paulsen,  Bradley,  Eucken  and  Bergson. 
This  he  has  not  essayed;  and,  pending  further  evidence, 
we  may  venture  without  undue  presumption  to  doubt 
whether  he  can  do  it. 

Let  us  remember,  however,  that  its  controversial 
passages  are  only  introduced  for  fun,  since  "Ortho- 
doxy" claims  to  be  no  more  than  a  spiritual  autobio- 
graphy, and  much  reasoning  is  declared  to  make  us 
mad.  We  are  dealing  with  the  record  of  a  personal 
experience,  not  with  a  process  of  argument.  Mr.  Ches- 
terton learned  his  philosophy  of  life  from  the  fairy- 
tales, not  of  science,  but  of  the  nursery.  In  these,  as  he 
has  testified  many  times,  he  found  an  attitude  towards 
life  which  squared  with  his  own  temperament  and  re- 
inforced him  in  his  spontaneous  emotional  reactions 
upon  the  world  in  which  he  foimd  himself.  From  them 
he  first  learned  the  mingled  goodness  and  evil  of  the 
world,  and  the  sane  balance  of  deep  discontent  and 
yet  deeper  content.  They  taught  him  to  doubt  the 
tacit  presuppositions  of  that  shallow  materialism  which 
he  mistakes  for  modern  thought.  They  encouraged  him 
to  trust  his  own  immediate  intuition,  that  the  really 
striking  characteristic  of  the  world  is  not  its  regularity, 
its  repetition,  its  classifiability,  but  its  spontaneity,  its 
eternal  eruption  of  individuality,  its  penchant  for  the 
unprecedented  and  the  unclassifiable. 


CHESTERTON   AS   THEOLOGIAN     57 

In  short,  Mr.  Chesterton  claims  for  himself  that  he 
came  unconsciously  to  take  the  Christian  attitude  to- 
wards life  —  on  the  authority  of  fairy-tales.  Before  he 
had  thought  of  Christian  theology,  he  had  hammered 
out  for  himself  a  brand-new  heresy  that  was  first 
cousin  to  it;  and  his  subsequent  development  has  been 
simply  the  re-discovery  (as  he  humorously  expresses 
it)  of  what  had  been  discovered  before. 

Perhaps  the  best  chapter  of  his  fascinating  story  is 
the  one  entitled  ''The  Flag  of  the  World."  It  breathes 
a  spirit  of  which  there  is  a  plentiful  lack  in  our  day, 
and  affirms  a  truth  which  seems  now  more  than  ever 
to  need  reaffirming.  This  is  the  truth  which  saves  us 
from  the  extravagances  both  of  indiscriminate  opti- 
mism and  of  pessimism.  It  is  the  fact,  imquestionable 
as  soon  as  it  is  clearly  stated,  that  the  loyalty  which 
we  owe  to  life  is  ultimate  and  unconditional;  it  is  prior 
to  and  independent  of  any  calculation  of  the  quan- 
titative proportions  of  good  and  evil  in  the  world.  As 
the  patriot  does  not  dream  of  proportioning  his  loyalty 
to  the  precise  amount  of  worth  in  his  nation;  as  the 
child  does  not  mete  out  his  love  to  his  parents  by  refer- 
ence to  their  particular  degree  of  goodness  to  him, 
—  so  the  cosmic  patriot  "accepts  the  universe," 
simply  because  he  is  in  it  and  of  it.  For  him,  as  Mr. 
Chesterton  most  wisely  says,  the  goodness  of  the  world 
is  a  reason  for  loving  it,  and  its  badness  a  reason  for 
loving  it  still  more. 

But  how  are  we  to  account  for  this  mixture  of  good 


58  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

and  evil  in  man  and  nature,  —  in  that  universe  which 
we  love  because  we  must,  because  of  it  we  are  a  part  ? 
Mr.  Chesterton  finds  the  answer  in  the  Christian  doc- 
trines of  God,  and  of  original  sin. 

How  these  two  doctrines  hang  together,  —  how  the 
facts  of  sin  in  man  and  of  evil  in  the  subhuman  world 
are  to  be  reconciled  with  the  Creator's  supposed  attri- 
butes of  omnipotence  and  of  infinite  goodness,  —  Mr. 
Chesterton  very  unkindly  refrains  from  telling  us;  yet 
his  silence  is  perhaps  prudent,  for  the  two  dogmas  stand 
opposed  in  eternal  and  irreconcilable  contradiction. 
But  of  the  fact  of  sin  there  is  assuredly  no  doubt.  And 
hereMr.  Chesterton,  with  an  inconsequence  which  again 
illustrates  the  incurable  looseness  I  have  complained 
of  in  his  thinking,  makes  an  illicit  leap.  He  passes  from 
the  patent  fact  of  sin  to  the  alleged  fact  of  original  sin, 
which  is  a  totally  different  matter.  Original  sin,  he 
hardily  declares,  "is  the  only  part  of  Christian  theol- 
ogy which  can  really  be  proved."  But  how  can  the  fact 
that  we  come  into  the  world  with  impulses  towards 
evil  as  well  as  towards  good  prove  that  we  are  de- 
scended from  an  ancestor  who  originally  was  devoid 
of  evil  impulses  ?  No  more  than  it  can  prove  our  de- 
scent from  one  who  at  first  had  no  good  impulses  at 
all.  Neither  is  this  fact  explained  by  the  naive  hypo- 
thesis of  a  once  complete  goodness  which  became,  in 
despite  of  omnipotence,  inexplicably  perverted  into 
an  original  badness.  The  explanation  needs  more 
explaining  than  the  original  mystery.    The  facts  of 


CHESTERTON  AS   THEOLOGIAN     59 

life  no  more  prove  the  Christian  doctrine  than  they 
prove  metempsychosis  or  karma.  Either  of  these 
theories  will  fit  and  explain  the  facts  rather  better 
than  does  the  orthodox  notion  of  the  Fall  of  Man. 
How  queerly  this  argument  of  Mr.  Chesterton's  illu- 
minates for  us  the  workings  of  his  mind !  The  fault 
it  displays  is  all  too  common  among  professional  theo- 
logians, but  one  might  have  hoped  that  the  adven- 
turous literary  amateur  would  escape  it;  —  the  fault, 
I  mean,  of  talking  about  "proof,"  when  he  cannot 
produce  (because  he  has  not  got)  a  single  grain  of 
verifiable  evidence. 

But  life,  he  tells  us,  is  itself  contradictory.  It  is  full 
of  paradoxes,  and  to  its  paradoxes  answer  those  of 
the  Church.  It  is  unreasonable,  therefore,  he  urges,  to 
complain  of  riddles  in  theology  when  these  manifestly 
correspond  to  riddles  of  experience  which  are  equally 
insoluble.  His  theology  he  takes  to  be  "the  best  root 
of  energy  and  sound  ethics."  Life  demands  of  us  an 
eternal  revolution,  the  inspiration  for  which,  he  thinks, 
can  come  only  from  our  acceptance  of  a  doctrine  of 
original  sin  which  shall  warn  us  that  the  best  hirnian 
institutions  are  in  constant  danger  of  being  wrested 
into  instruments  of  oppression.  But  why  do  we  need, 
in  our  warfare  against  the  evil  tendencies  within  us 
and  around  us,  any  other  stimulus  than  the  facts 
themselves  of  experience?  Or,  if  other  stimulus  be 
needed,  how  can  we  find  it  in  a  doctrine  which  is  itself 
unverifiable,  and  itself,  when  rightly  understood  (as 


6o  CRITICISMS  OF  LIFE 

it  was,  for  example,  by  St.  Augustine,  the  inventor  of 
that  system  of  theology  which  Mr.  Chesterton  loathes 
and  derides  under  the  name  of  Calvinism),  a  direct 
incentive  to  pessimism  as  regards  the  nature  of  man 
and  his  native  powers  for  good  ? 

Upon  the  vague  modern  doctrines  of  pantheism 
and  of  the  identity  of  man  as  he  actually  is  with  God, 
Mr.  Chesterton  makes  an  onslaught  which  is  brilliant 
and  delightful,  and,  I  think,  substantially  sound.  But 
even  here  he  does  not  reach  bedrock;  he  cannot  dis- 
tinguish between  the  empirical  self  and  the  Self  of 
selves,  the  Man  in  men.  The  result  is  that  he  inverts 
and  distorts  the  meaning  of  Swinburne's  "Hertha" 
(a  stanza  of  which  he  quotes,  with  his  customary  in- 
accuracy). Swinburne  represents  the  Soul  of  all 
things  as  saying  to  the  individual  man,  ''I  am  thou, 
whom  thou  seekest  to  find  him;  find  thou  but  thyself, 
thou  art  I."  Whereupon  Mr.  Chesterton  comments 
as  follows:  — 

Of  which  the  immediate  and  evident  deduction  is 
that  tyrants  are  as  much  the  sons  of  God  as  Garibaldis; 
and  that  King  Bomba  of  Naples,  having,  with  the  ut- 
most success,  "found  himself,"  is  identical  with  the  ulti- 
mate good  in  all  things. 

If  he  had  taken  the  trouble  to  read  thirty  pages 
further  on  in  "Songs  before  Sunrise,"  he  would  have 
discovered  that  Swinburne  by  no  means  identifies  the 
bad  in  man  with  God,  or  admits  that  all  men  are 
divine.   God  is  not  the  totality  of  the  human,  but  its 


CHESTERTON  AS   THEOLOGIAN     6i 

essence y  which  is  a  very  different  matter;  and  that 
essence  is  the  good.   As  thus:  — 

God,  if  a  God  there  be,  is  the  substance  of  men,  which  is 
Man. 

Not  each  man  of  all  men  is  God,  but  God  is  the  fruit  of  the 

whole; 
Indivisible  spirit  and  blood,  indiscernible  body  from  soul. 
Not  men's  but  Man's  is  the  glory  of  Godhead,  the  kingdom  of 

time. . .  . 

And  later,  in  the  same  "Hymn  of  Man,"  Swin- 
burne acknowledges  (as  he  does  in  a  score  of  passages 
in  the  same  volume)  that  by  pandering  to  his  lower 
self  instead  of  following  his  essential  and  universal 
self,  man  has  sinned  and  failed:  — 

Man  makes  love  to  disaster,  and  woos  desolation  with  love, 
Yea,  himself  too  hath  made  himself  chains,  and  his  own  hands 

plucked  out  his  eyes; 
For  his  own  soul  only  constrains  him,  his  own  mouth  only  denies. 

Once  again,  Mr.  Chesterton's  criticism  recoils  with 
disastrous  effect  upon  that  theology  which  he  supposes 
himself  to  be  defending.  For  orthodoxy,  too,  has  its 
doctrine  of  the  identity  of  men  with  God.  By  its 
sacrament  of  baptism,  it  professes  to  make  men  "mem- 
bers of  Christ,  children  of  God,  and  inheritors  of  the 
kingdom  of  heaven."  It  assumes  to  regenerate  them 
into  that  original  divine  nature  which  the  first  man 
forfeited.  Between  the  regenerate  and  the  unregener- 
ate  the  only  difference  is  that  the  one  has  received 
this  sacrament,  the  other  not.  The  difference  is  totally 


62  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

unrelated  to  ethics  and  to  character.  Have  we  not 
here  a  possible  explanation  of  the  spiritual  pride  and 
blindness  which  have  characterized  the  Church  in  all 
ages,  which  underlay  the  practices  of  the  Inquisitors, 
and  are  to-day  manifested,  for  example,  in  the  treat- 
ment of  the  Jews  in  Holy  Russia  ? 

One  has  constantly  to  remind  oneself,  however,  that 
in  "Orthodoxy"  one  is  reading  autobiography  rather 
than  apologetic.  The  special  interest  of  Mr.  Chester- 
ton's case  is  not  logical  but  psychological.  A  revolter 
by  temperament,  he  must  needs  have  rebelled  against 
the  school  of  thought,  whatever  it  was,  in  which  he 
happened  to  be  reared.  Because  he  was  trained  in 
theological  liberalism,  he  naturally  revolted  into  its 
opposite.  From  agnosticism  he  has  leaped  over  to 
CathoHcism;  and  no  attentive  student  can  doubt  that, 
had  he  been  reared  in  Catholicism,  he  would  have 
revolted  just  as  spontaneously  into  agnosticism;  — 
as  (by  the  grace  of  God)  he  may  yet  live  to  do:  into 
an  agnosticism  wiser  and  humbler  than  that  from 
which  he  set  out.  The  best  picture  he  has  given  us  of 
himself  is  to  be  found  not  in  "Orthodoxy,"  but  in  his 
freaky  novel  called  "The  Man  Who  Was  Thursday." 
The  hero  of  that  fantasy  —  who  is,  as  usual,  but  a 
mask  for  Mr.  Chesterton  himself  —  is  described  as 
having  "revolted  into  sanity,"  because  there  was 
nothing  else  left  to  revolt  into.  And  how  strictly  Mr. 
Chesterton's  own  development  has  been  an  emotional 
and  temperamental  one  is  perhaps  shown  best  of  all 


CHESTERTON    AS   THEOLOGIAN     63 

by  the  lines  in  which  he  dedicates  this  book  to  his 
friend  Mr.  Edmund  Clerihew  Bentley:  — 

A  cloud  was  on  the  mind  of  men,  and  wailing  went  the  weather, 
Yea,  a  sick  cloud  upon  the  soul  when  we  were  boys  together. 
Science  announced  non-entity  and  art  admired  decay; 
The  world  was  old  and  ended;  but  you  and  I  were  gay. 
Round  us  in  antic  order  their  ^  crippled  vices  came  — 
Lust  that  had  lost  its  laughter,  fear  that  had  lost  its  shame. 
Like  the  white  lock  of  Whistler,  that  Ht  our  aimless  gloom, 
Men  showed  their  own  white  feather  as  proudly  as  a  plume. 
Life  was  a  fly  that  faded,  and  death  a  drone  that  stung; 
The  world  was  very  old  indeed  when  you  and  I  were  young. 
They  twisted  even  decent  sin  to  shapes  not  to  be  named: 
Men  were  ashamed  of  honour;  but  we  were  not  ashamed. 
Weak  if  we  were  and  fooHsh,  not  thus  we  failed,  not  thus; 
When  that  black  Baal  blocked  the  heavens,  he  had  no  hymns 

from  us. 
Children  we  were  —  our  forts  of  sand  were  even  weak  as  we; 
High  as  they  went  we  piled  them  up  to  break  that  bitter  sea. 
Fools  as  we  were  in  motley,  all  jangling  and  absurd, 
When  all  church  bells  were  silent  our  cap  and  bells  were  heard. 

But  we  were  young;  we  lived  to  see  God  break  their  ^  bitter 

charms, 
God  and  the  good  Republic  come  riding  back  in  arms:  ^ 
We  have  seen  the  City  of  Mansoul,  even  as  it  rocked,  relieved  — 
Blessed  are  they  who  did  not  see,  but,  being  blind,  believed. 

Between  us,  by  the  peace  of  God,  such  truth  can  now  be 

told; 
Yea,  there  is  strength  in  striking  root,  and  good  in  growing 

old. 
We  have  found  common  things  at  last,  and  marriage  and  a 

creed. 
And  I  may  safely  write  it  now,  and  you  may  safely  read. 

1  Sic. 


64  CRITICISMS   OF   LIFE 

Temperament,  then,  and  that  sanity  of  ethical 
intuition  in  which  we  have  found  his  most  admirable 
attribute,  are  the  factors  that  explain  his  change  of 
attitude.  And  surely  he  was  right  to  revolt  against 
what  he,  although  mistakenly,  imagined  to  be  the 
inevitable  tendencies  of  modern  thought.  The  doc- 
trine of  the  world-machine,  the  doctrine  of  mechani- 
cal determinism,  the  doctrine  of  the  absolute  depend- 
ence of  mind  on  body,  the  new  mythology  in  which 
the  hypostatized  abstractions  called  Heredity  and 
Environment  replace  the  Adam  and  Satan  of  the  old 
mythology,  —  all  these  unverified  and  unverifiable 
dogmas  lay  on  the  mind  of  men,  and  formed  a  sick 
cloud  upon  the  soul,  when  he  and  his  friend  were  boys 
together.  But  was  it  not  enough  to  expel  these  harpies, 
without  replacing  them  by  a  brood  of  darkness  equally 
phantasmagorical,  equally  crushing  and  annihilating 
in  their  impact  upon  the  spirit  of  man  ?  For  this  is 
what  Mr.  Chesterton  has  done.  His  orthodoxy  is  new 
to  him;  he  finds  it  "all  a  wonder  and  a  wild  desire." 
But  he  will  find  sooner  or  later,  if  he  scrutinizes  it  as 
ruthlessly  as  he  did  the  ideas  current  around  him  in 
his  boyhood,  that  he  has  escaped  Charybdis  only  to 
be  hopelessly  shipwrecked  upon  Scylla. 

There  is  one  part  of  Mr.  Chesterton's  argument 
which  shows  almost  grotesquely  how  dangerous  it  is 
to  try  to  defend  orthodoxy  when  you  do  not  yet  quite 
know  what  orthodoxy  is.  The  gist  of  his  spiritual 
autobiography  is  that  he  invented  Christianity  for 


CHESTERTON   AS   THEOLOGIAN     65 

himself;  whereafter  he  discovered  with  blank  amaze- 
ment that  the  system  which  he  had  painfully  hewn 
out  had  antedated  his  own  existence  by  some  eighteen 
hundred  years.  "I  did  try/'  he  says,  ^^to  found  a 
heresy  of  my  own;  and  when  I  had  put  the  last  touches 
to  it,  I  discovered  that  it  was  orthodoxy.''  Behold 
how  ingenuously  the  inexpert  player  kicks  over  his 
wicket  in  his  anxiety  to  score!  The  whole  contention 
of  orthodox  theology  is  that  its  scheme  is  so  wonderful, 
so  supernatural,  that  the  imaided  powers  of  the  na- 
tural man  could  never  have  shaped  it.  It  is  based 
upon  revelation  from  on  high,  and  is  declared  to  be  of 
such  a  nature  as  to  carry  within  itself  the  evidence  of 
its  extra-mundane  origin.  That  modern  science  which 
Mr.  Chesterton  so  ungratefully  derides  has  demon- 
strated, as  against  this  claim,  that  the  orthodox  scheme 
is  but  one  of  a  series  of  blundering  hypotheses  invented 
to  accoimt  for  the  obvious  facts  of  Hfe;  and  he  concedes 
that  men  could  have  invented  it  —  because  he  did  so 
himself!  He  does  not  lay  claim  to  a  special  private 
revelation,  vouchsafed  to  him  alone,  like  St.  Paul's 
or  Lord  Herbert  of  Cherbury's.  He,  Gilbert  Chester- 
ton, tried  to  found  a  heresy  of  his  own;  and  when  he 
had  put  the  finishing  touches  to  it,  he  discovered  that 
it  was  orthodoxy ! 

His  amazement,  therefore,  at  finding  that  Chris- 
tian dogma  fitted  his  feelings  and  answered  his  ques- 
tions, is  entirely  gratuitous.  The  reason  why  it  does 
so  is  simply  because  other  men  in  other  times,  of  like 


66  CRITICISMS   OF   LIFE 

nature  with  himself,  did  exactly  what  he  claims  to 
have  done.  They  too  founded  a  heresy  of  their  own, 
and  when  they  had  put  the  last  touches  to  it,  they 
made  it  orthodoxy  by  calHng  it  so  and  murdering  all 
gainsay ers.  There  is  nothing  more  mysterious  in  the 
process  than  there  would  be  if  a  coat,  made  to  fit  a 
man  of  Mr.  Chesterton's  height  and  girth  (let  us  say, 
Velazquez's  Cavalier),  having  accidentally  survived 
the  centuries,  should  now  be  found  to  fit  Mr.  Chester- 
ton. The  makers  of  orthodoxy  cut  their  theology  to 
fit  their  souls;  why  then  should  it  not  fit  Mr.  Chester- 
ton's, since  his  happens  to  be  of  the  same  size  ? 

His  objection  to  the  modem  doctrines  of  material- 
ism, mechanical  determinism,  and  the  like,  is  that 
they  are,  or  may  easily  become,  the  alUes  of  oppres- 
sion. I  fully  admit  the  possibiHty.  But  how  has  Mr. 
Chesterton  succeeded  in  overlooking  the  obtrusive 
fact  that  his  beloved  orthodoxy  has,  throughout  his- 
tory, been  fifty  times  more  the  ally  of  oppression  than 
they  ?  Was  it  materialism  that  decimated  the  Jews  of 
Spain  and  Portugal,  and  then  broke  faith  with  them 
and  expelled  them?  Was  it  modern  scientific  thought 
that  obliterated  the  native  races  of  Spanish  America, 
and  made  a  moral  and  a  physical  desert,  in  that  mad 
rush  for  God  and  gold  which  was  Spanish  imperial- 
ism? Did  mechanical  determinism  give  rise  to  the 
massacre  of  St.  Bartholomew,  or  revoke  the  Edict  of 
Nantes  ?  Were  the  fires  of  Smithfield,  the  witch-burn- 
ings and  heresy-himtings  which  blacken  the  history  of 


CHESTERTON   AS   THEOLOGIAN    67 

England  and  Scotland,  produced  by  the  doctrines  of 
Haeckel  or  the  puzzle-headed  scepticisms  of  Mr.  H.  G. 
Wells  ?  I  will  not  join  in  the  cheap  and  easy  amuse- 
ment of  flinging  mud  at  a  great  historic  institution  like 
the  Catholic  Church;  but  I  cannot  lightly  set  aside  the 
temperate  and  irrefragable  indictment  which  Lecky 
brings  against  her,  that  she  has  "shed  more  innocent 
blood,  and  caused  more  unmerited  suffering,  than  any 
other  institution  known  to  history." 

Mr.  Chesterton  has  an  inborn  love  of  liberty,  a 
hatred  of  oppression,  which  entitle  him  to  our  pro- 
found and  grateful  respect.  No  man  has  battled  more 
bravely  than  he  against  the  hypocritical  tyrannies  of 
our  present-day  political  and  economic  systems.  In 
any  purely  moral  issue,  in  any  battle  for  genuine  free- 
dom, he  is  almost  certain  to  be  found  on  the  right  side; 
and  when  he  goes  wrong  —  when,  for  instance,  we 
find  him  joining  in  the  mediaeval  barbarism,  recently 
revived  in  England,  of  Jew-baiting  —  we  can  generally 
make  a  pretty  shrewd  guess  at  the  identity  of  those  of 
his  fellow-Catholics  who  have  misled  him.  This  char- 
acteristic in  him  entitles  us  to  ask  why  he  has  em- 
braced a  doctrine  which  has,  throughout  the  history  of 
fifteen  hundred  years,  been  enthroned  in  power  and 
allied  with  every  kind  of  oppression;  a  doctrine  whose 
custodians  have  slaughtered  both  souls  and  bodies  in 
the  interests  of  their  spiritual  despotism  and  their 
Church's  temporal  power.  How  is  it  that  he  is  so  ready 
to  tell  us  of  the  witch-burnings  practised  in  Puritan 


68  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

Massachusetts,  and  so  oblivious  of  the  fact  that  where 
Puritanism  has  slain  its  thousands,  Catholicism  has 
burnt  and  tortured  its  tens  of  thousands  ? 

In  a  recent  issue  of  the  "Dublin  Review,"  Mr.  Wil- 
frid Ward  testified  to  the  originality  of  the  apologetic 
work  done  by  Mr.  Chesterton  in  "Orthodoxy."  This 
was  uncommonly  generous  of  Mr.  Ward,  who  has  him- 
self done  such  very  fresh  and  interesting  work  of  the 
same  order,  in  his  "Witnesses  to  the  Unseen"  and 
elsewhere.  No  one  will  dispute  his  claim  so  far  as  it 
relates  to  the  manner  of  the  book;  but  as  regards  its 
matter,  it  is  our  duty  to  remind  a  busy  and  forgetful 
generation  that  Mr.  Chesterton  has  not  the  slightest 
claim  to  originality.  His  whole  book  (in  so  far  as  it 
forgets  to  be  an  autobiography  and  becomes  a  polemic) 
is  nothing  but  a  rehash  of  two  arguments  which  wiU 
be  found  more  ably  presented,  backed  up  by  far  deeper 
philosophic  insight  and  far  greater  power  of  rational 
thought,  in  two  of  the  classics  of  Christian  apologetics: 
the  "Analogy"  of  Bishop  Butler  and  the  "Apologia" 
of  Cardinal  Newman. 

Bishop  Butler's  masterly  work  is  little  else  than  a 
sustained  and  powerful  insistence  that  the  dogmas  of 
Christianity  fit  and  explain  the  facts  of  life  better  than 
did  the  complacent  optimism  of  the  Deists,  against 
whom  he  contended.  And  the  great  Cardinal's  memora- 
ble book  anticipates  and  presses  home  (with  destruc- 
tive effect  as  against  Protestantism)  the  danger  of  that 
very  suicide  of  thought  which  alarms  Mr.  Chesterton. 


CHESTERTON   AS   THEOLOGIAN     69 

With  incomparable  lucidity,  Newman  shows  that 
an  infallible  Bible  is  useless  and  dangerous  unless 
backed  up  and  interpreted  by  an  infallible  visible 
authority.  Scripture,  he  tells  us,  is  impotent  to ' '  make 
a  stand  against  the  wild,  living  intellect  of  man."  The 
infallibility  of  the  Church  was  supernaturally  designed 
"to  restrain  that  freedom  of  thought,  which  of  course 
in  itself  is  one  of  the  greatest  of  our  natural  gifts,  and 
to  rescue  it  from  its  own  suicidal  excesses  J  ^  This  is, 
indeed,  like  Butler's,  only  an  argumentum  ad  hominem; 
but  neither  Butler  nor  Newman  has  ever  been  or  ever 
will  be  answered  effectively  from  the  point  of  view  of 
those  against  whom  each  wrote.  Readers,  therefore, 
who  wish  to  see  the  argument  for  orthodoxy  at  its 
best,  as  it  is  presented  by  the  great  masters  of  Chris- 
tian thought,  will  turn  to  Newman  and  Butler,  to 
Pascal,  Chillingworth  and  Hooker.  After  reading 
these,  they  will  see  in  Mr.  Chesterton's  amateur  apo- 
logetics nothing  but  a  psychological  curiosity,  to  be 
read,  like  his  novels,  for  amusement,  in  some  slight 
degree  j^rhaps  for  edification,  but  not  at  all  for  in- 
struction. 

For,  after  all,  we  are  left  with  the  gravest  reasons 
for  suspecting  not  only  Mr.  Chesterton's  argumenta- 
tive powers,  but  actually  the  soimdness  of  his  ortho- 
doxy. It  is  alarming  to  find  that  in  his  opinion  Chris- 
tian theology  is  "sufficiently  summarized  in  the 
Apostles'  Creed."  One's  apprehensions  are  awakened 
by  the  assertion  that  "when  the  word  'orthodoxy'  is 


70  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

used  here  it  means  the  Apostles'  Creed,  as  under- 
stood by  eueryhody  calling  himself  Christian  until  a 
very  short  time  ago."  To  what  good  Catholic  can 
this  possibly  be  satisfactory?  If  we  were  addicted  to 
Mr.  Chesterton's  habit  of  flippant  paradox,  we  should 
declare  that  the  Apostles'  Creed  is  not  orthodox.  That 
would  certainly  be  quite  in  his  manner.  Caring,  how- 
ever, more  for  truth  than  for  startHngness  of  state- 
ment, let  us  content  ourselves  with  the  moderate  and 
incontrovertible  assertion  that  the  Apostles'  Creed 
does  not  sufficiently  summarize  Christian  theology; 
and  no  Catholic  theologian  who  knew  his  business 
would  admit  for  a  moment  that  beHef  in  it  was  suffi- 
cient to  make  a  man  a  Christian.  No  doubt  it  contains 
a  great  deal  more  doctrine  than  was  believed  in  by  St. 
Paul  and  the  writers  of  the  Synoptic  Gospels,  but  that 
only  shows  what  a  wonderful  thing  "development" 
may  be  in  an  unchanging  Church.  The  successors  of 
St.  Peter  have  made  the  faith  once  delivered  to  him 
and  his  colleagues  into  something  richer  and  stranger 
than  he  ever  dreamed  of;  and  if  St.  Peter  could  reap- 
pear to-day,  with  only  such  beliefs  as  he  held  when 
he  died,  not  a  Catholic  bishop  in  Christendom  would 
confirm  him  —  much  less  admit  him  to  Orders. 

For  all  that,  however,  the  so-called  Apostles'  Creed 
is  an  entirely  unsatisfactory  statement  of  the  Church's 
position;  and  the  Church  has  tacitly  admitted  the 
fact.  For  if  the  ApostoHc  formula  expressed  its  theol- 
ogy adequately,  why  was  it  found  necessary  in  sub- 


CHESTERTON   AS   THEOLOGIAN    71 

sequent  Councils  to  proceed  to  the  formulation  first  of 
the  Nicene,  and  afterwards  of  the  Athanasian  Creed, 
—  to  say  nothing  of  the  Tridentine  Decrees,  and  even 
later  definitions  of  matters  of  faith?  The  truth  is  that 
the  Apostles'  Creed  omits  the  very  vitals  of  orthodoxy. 
It  does  not  even  assert  that  God  the  Father  is  a  person, 
or  that  the  Holy  Ghost  is  God.  It  contains  no  allu- 
sion to  original  sin;  it  fails  to  affirm  the  deity  of  Jesus; 
it  makes  no  mention  of  the  Trinity.  It  has  no  glimmer 
of  a  reference  to  the  sacraments,  to  the  authority  of 
the  Church  or  of  Scripture,  or  to  any  doctrine  dis- 
tinctive of  the  Catholic  Church  as  compared  with 
the  Protestant  sects.  So  that  even  if  Mr.  Chester- 
ton succeeded  in  proving  (what  he  has  dehberately 
abstained  from  trying  to  prove)  that  there  is  vaUd 
historic  and  philosophic  groimd  for  believing  in  the 
Apostles'  Creed,  we  should  still  be  as  devoid  as  ever 
of  adequate  warrant  for  following  him  into  the 
Church's  fold. 

The  lamest  of  Mr.  Chesterton's  many  lame  argu- 
ments is  his  maladroit  defence  of  miracle.  In  this  part 
of  his  book  he  substitutes  sneering  for  argument  even 
more  liberally  than  elsewhere;  and  his  case  for  mir- 
acles, if  it  may  be  called  a  case  for  them  at  all,  works 
down  to  the  simple-minded  contentions,  first  that 
miracles  happen  to-day  as  much  as  in  the  past,  and 
secondly  that  you  must  accept  unreservedly  the  asser- 
tion of  any  peasant  who  informs  you  that  he  has  seen 
a  ghost.  You  are  to  believe  not  only  in  his  veracity,  — 


72  CRITICISMS  OF  LIFE 

which  may  well  be  above  suspicion,  —  but  also  in  his 
competence  to  interpret  his  experience!  The  whole 
discussion  is  rendered  profitless  by  the  fact  that  Mr. 
Chesterton  never  condescends  to  inform  us  what  he 
means  by  a  miracle.  Now  the  word  miracle,  as  used 
historically  in  Christian  theology  to  describe  the  won- 
derful deeds  of  Jesus  and  his  apostles,  means  a  breach 
of  the  phenomenal  sequences  of  nature.  It  is  illegiti- 
mately used  when  applied  to  any  event,  however  rare 
or  even  totally  unprecedented,  which  arose  naturally 
from  adequate  phenomenal  antecedents.  Anything 
which  would  happen  again  if  the  circumstances  condi- 
tioning it  were  repeated,  is  not  a  miracle;  not  even 
though  it  were  a  case  of  resurrection  from  the  dead,  or 
of  human  generation  without  the  normal  process  of 
sexual  fecimdation.  A  perfectly  trivial  circumstance, 
on  the  other  hand,  such  as  the  bending  of  a  blade  of 
grass,  or  the  freezing  of  a  drop  of  water,  would  be  a 
miracle  if  it  occurred  independently  of  its  accustomed 
context  of  physical  antecedents  and  concomitants. 

Mr.  Chesterton  is  inexcusably  mistaken  in  thinking 
that  those  who  reject  the  Christian  miracles  do  so  by 
reason  of  an  a  priori  conviction  that  miracles  either 
cannot  or  do  not  happen.^  They  reject  them  for  lack 

*  In  the  debate  held  at  the  Little  Theatre  in  London  on  January 
2ist,  1914,  as  a  part  of  the  "boom,"  referred  to  on  p.  43,  which  was 
got  up  to  save  Magic  from  failing,  Mr.  Hilaire  Belloc  committed  him- 
self to  the  astonishing  statement  that  Huxley  rejected  miracles  not 
for  lack  of  evidence,  but  because  he  denied  the  existence  of  any  "per- 
sonality behind  nature,"  and  therefore  held  them  to  be  antecedently 
incredible.  A  little  later  he  affirmed  that  to-day  "almost  all  the  rich 


CHESTERTON   AS  THEOLOGIAN    73 

of  evidence,  just  as  they  reject  any  alleged  natural 
event,  —  such  as  the  discovery  of  America  by  ancient 
Jews,  affirmed  by  Mormonism,  or  the  founding  of 
Rome  by  Romulus  and  Remus,  —  for  which  there  is 
no  adequate  documentary  or  other  historical  warrant. 
Mr.  Chesterton,  on  the  other  hand,  like  his  fellow- 
Catholics,  does  not  base  his  acceptance  of  the  miracles 
of  Galilee  and  Lourdes  upon  the  amount  and  kind  of 
evidence  which  can  be  adduced  in  their  support.  He 
believes  in  them  in  virtue  of  an  a  priori  doctrine.^  If 
it  were  not  so,  —  if  it  were  merely  a  question  of  evi- 
dence, —  he  would  have  to  accept  a  host  of  alleged 

are  on  the  side  of  atheism."  Both  assertions  contain  eicactly  the  same 
amount  of  truth  —  and  that  is  none  at  all.  Huxley  never  in  his  life 
denied  either  the  existence  of  a  "personality  behind  nature"  or  the 
antecedent  possibility  of  miracle.  He  did  deny  that  the  particular 
miracles  related  in  the  New  Testament,  and  others  vouched  for  by 
Catholic  tradition,  have  any  such  evidence  as  to  justify  belief  in  them. 
But  that  is  a  totally  distinct  question.  The  iromoral  levity  with  which 
a  cultured  man  like  Mr.  Belloc  misrepresents  views  he  does  not  hold 
is  a  precious  commentary  on  the  ethical  influence  of  his  Church.  We 
know  he  is  a  cultured  man,  because  we  have  his  own  word  for  it.  The 
essays  on  Agnosticism  and  on  The  Value  of  Witness  to  the  Miraculous 
in  which  Huxley  made  his  position  transparently  clear  can  be  ob- 
tained at  any  public  library,  and  can  be  purchased  in  England 
(where  books  are  cheap)  in  an  excellently  printed  edition  published  by 
Messrs.  Macmillan  for  sixpence.  So  there  is  absolutely  no  excuse  for 
Mr.  Belloc. 

1  His  brother  Cecil  fully  admitted  this  in  the  debate  referred  to  in 
the  preceding  footnote.  Dealing  with  the  miracle  of  the  Virgin  Birth, 
he  conceded  that  there  is  not  —  as  indeed  there  could  not  be  —  any 
human  evidence  for  it  whatever.  But,  as  he  quite  correctly  added. 
Catholics  believe  it  because  they  hold  it  more  probable  that  it  hap- 
pened than  that  the  Church  should  be  mistaken  or  should  wish  to 
deceive.  Which  amounts  to  sa3dng  that  they  believe  whatever  the 
Church  chooses  to  tell  them.  The  circulus  in  probandi  is  complete. 
The  Church  is  credible  because  it  is  attested  by  miracle  —  and  miracle 
is  credible  because  it  is  attested  by  the  Church. 


74  CRITICISMS   OF   LIFE 

pagan  miracles  which  he  now  rejects,  but  which  in 
truth  (Church  authority  apart)  are  far  better  attested 
than  most  of  those  which  he  accepts. 
.  It  is,  of  course,  only  a  vulgar  confusion  of  thought, 
as  Matthew  Arnold  long  since  pointed  out,  which  sees 
in  miracles  any  evidence  to  anything  beyond  them- 
selves. If  a  man  walked  upon  the  sea,  that  would 
prove  nothing  except  the  fact  that  he  could  walk  upon 
the  sea;  it  would  add  no  jot  or  tittle  of  weight  to  any 
statements  he  might  make  about  the  nature  of  God  or 
the  life  of  the  soul  after  death.  The  procedure  of  those 
Christians  who  have  accepted  the  teachings  of  Jesus 
Christ  because  they  believed  that  he  had  been  able 
to  still  the  winds  and  transmute  water  into  wine  is  an 
instance  of  inconsequential  reasoning  due  to  philoso- 
phic illiteracy. 

Those  who  reject  the  New  Testament  miracles  need 
not  take  either  the  critical  attitude  of  Hume  (who  held 
that  in  any  given  case  it  was  more  probable  that  the 
testimony  was  false  or  mistaken  than  that  the  alleged 
miracle  occurred)  or  the  standpoint  of  Kant,  who 
maintained  that  unless  an  event  were  strictly  artic- 
ulated in  the  causal  series,  it  could  not  enter  into 
human  perception,  —  causality  being  a  necessary  form 
of  all  thought  and  experience,  or,  as  Professor  Adler 
calls  it,  a  ''fimctional  finality."  We  can  dispose  of  the 
whole  question  of  the  New  Testament  miracles  on 
the  ground  of  their  lack  of  historic  support.  It  is  not 
too  much  to  say,  at  this  time  of  day,  that  a  man  who 


CHESTERTON  AS  THEOLOGIAN     75 

professes  to  believe  in  them,  in  the  full,  literal,  unhesi- 
tating way  in  which  mediaeval  Christians  believed  in 
them,  is  a  man  who  either  cannot  or  will  not  penetrate 
to  the  bottom  of  the  discussion.  Mr.  Chesterton  is 
such  a  man.  He  has  not  approfondi  les  choses.  He 
does  instead  what  he  unjustly  accuses  Matthew 
Arnold  of  doing:  he  '' recites  his  dogma  with  implicit 
faith." 

To  sum  up:  Our  objection  to  orthodoxy  is,  first, 
that  it  is  unverifiable,  either  by  history  or  by  present- 
day  experience;  and  secondly,  that  history  proves  it 
to  have  been  actually  disastrous  in  its  consequences 
for  humanity,  in  the  very  way  in  which  Mr.  Chesterton 
thinks  modern  thought  may  be  disastrous.  It  is,  as 
we  have  said,  an  imsupported  guess  at  an  insoluble 
mystery. 

Mr.  Chesterton  ought  to  have  called  his  book  not 
''Orthodoxy,"  but  "How  I  Found  God."  For  it  is 
in  truth  the  story  of  his  attainment  of  peace,  of  his 
tardy  and  hard-won  reconciliation  with  the  eternal 
order  of  things.  Here,  on  the  ground  of  experience, 
the  religious  liberals  at  whom  he  gibes  can  join  hands 
with  him;  for  they  too,  in  this  sense,  have  foimd  God. 
And  they  have  found  a  deeper  truth  than  Mr.  Chester- 
ton's; —  the  truth  that  for  real  reconcihation  with  life 
no  ecclesiastical  dogma  is  necessary,  and  no  answer 
to  the  insatiable  questionings  of  man's  metaphysical 
craving.  The  truly  redeemed  man  is  not  he  who  has 
attained  a  theory  which  solves  for  him  the  mysteries  of 


76  CRITICISMS  OF  LIFE 

being,  but  he  who  has  reached  the  point  where  he  no 
longer  yearns  for  a  solution  of  the  riddles.  In  the  inti- 
mate realities  of  experience  itself,  —  in  the  loyalty  of 
comrades,  in  the  love  of  husband  and  wife,  in  the 
mystery  of  birth  and  the  joy  of  parenthood;  above  all, 
in  the  sublimity  of  the  moral  law,  at  once  consoling 
and  energizing,  we  find  the  divine:  we  attain  both  the 
peace  that  passes  understanding  and  the  inspiration 
for  the  unending  battle  with  evil.  We  rejoice  with  Mr. 
Chesterton  in  the  joy  that  he  has  foimd,  though  we 
regret  his  manifest  inability  to  distinguish  between  his 
experience  and  the  muddled  and  cramping  framework 
of  theory  into  which  he  has  forced  it.  The  God  that 
he  has  found,  the  God  in  whom  he  truly  lives  and  has 
his  being,  is  not  the  God  of  the  Athanasian  Creed;  it 
is  the  much  more  real  and  potent  factor  which  inspires 
the  lofty  lines  of  Mr.  Zangwill:  — 

God  lives  as  much  as  in  the  days  of  yore, 
In  fires  of  human  love  and  work  and  song, 
In  wells  of  human  tears  that  pitying  throng, 
In  thunder-clouds  of  himian  wrath  at  wrong. 

Perchance,  O  ye  that  toil  on,  though  forlorn, 
By  your  souls'  travail,  your  own  noble  scorn, 
The  very  God  ye  crave  is  being  born. 


CHAPTER  III 

PROFESSOR   ERNST   HAECKEL'S   NEW   CALVINISM 

It  was  wisely  remarked  some  years  ago  by  the  late 
Professor  Friedrich  Paulsen  that  '^  an  age  is  character- 
ized more  by  the  books  which  it  reads  than  by  those 
which  it  writes."  Paulsen  offered  this  dictum  as  his 
justification  for  devoting  a  good  deal  of  space  to  ex- 
posing the  network  of  fallacies  and  self-contradictions 
which  make  up  the  great  bulk  of  Ludwig  Biichner's 
once  universally  known,  but  now  almost  forgotten, 
treatise  entitled  "Force  and  Matter."  This  considera- 
tion also  led  him,  in  the  year  1900,  to  devote  a  lengthy 
article  in  the  "Preussische  Jahrbiicher"  to  a  minute 
analysis  of  the  positions  set  forth  in  Ernst  Haeckel's 
treatise  entitled  "The  Riddles  of  the  Universe,"  pub- 
lished in  1899.  After  completely  shattering  the  pre- 
tensions of  Haeckel  to  rank  as  a  philosopher,  and  ex- 
posing the  egregious  incompetence  and  the  blatant 
dogmatism  to  which  almost  every  page  of  his  volume 
bears  witness,  Dr.  Paulsen  ended  his  essay  with  the 
following  notable  words:  — 

If  every  nation  and  every  age  has  not  only  the  govern- 
ment but  also  the  literature  that  it  deserves  to  have,  yet, 
nevertheless,  the  responsibility  for  these  things  lies  upon 
all  who  have  part  in  them.  I  have  read  this  book  with 


78  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

burning  shame  —  with  shame  for  the  level  of  general 
culture  and  of  philosophic  culture  among  our  people. 
That  such  a  book  was  possible  —  that  it  could  have  been 
written,  printed,  bought,  read,  admired,  and  beUeved 
by  the  nation  that  possesses  a  Kant,  a  Goethe,  a  Scho- 
penhauer: this  is  painful.^ 

Already  in  1900,  when  this  essay  of  Paulsen's  ap- 
peared, the  book  of  which  it  treated  had  obtained  a 
wide  notoriety.  Since  then,  however,  it  has  enjoyed 
a  distribution  probably  unequalled  in  the  history  of 
the  world  by  any  other  treatise  dealing  with  such 
serious  themes  as  those  which  it  handles.  It  has  been 
translated  into  no  less  than  twenty-four  languages,  in- 
cluding Sanscrit.  The  publisher  of  the  English  trans- 
lation recently  informed  me  that  he  had  sold  over  a 
quarter  of  a  million  copies  of  it  in  England  and  the 
British  Colonies,  the  great  majority  of  which  had  been 
disposed  of  in  England.  Cheap  editions  of  it,  excel- 
lently printed,  can  be  obtained  in  every  European 
country,  and  would  be  available  also  in  America,  but 
for  the  unintelligent  tax  on  knowledge,  by  means  of 
which  cheap  literature,  good  as  well  as  bad,  is  excluded 

*  "  Hat  jedes  Volk  und  jede  Zeit,  wie  die  Regierung,  so  auch  die 
Literatur,  die  sie  zu  haben  verdienen,  nun  so  ist  damit  auch  Jedem, 
der  an  ihr  Theil  hat,  die  Mitverantwortlichkeit  dafiir  auferlegt.  Ich 
habe  mit  brennender  Scham  dieses  Buch  gelesen,  mit  Scham  iiber 
den  Stand  der  allgemeinen  Bildung  und  der  philosophischen  Bildung 
unseres  Volks.  Dass  ein  solches  Buch  moglich  war,  dass  es  geschrie- 
ben,  gedruckt,  gekauf t,  gelesen,  bewundert,  geglaubt  werden  konnte 
bei  dem  Volk,  das  einen  Kant,  einen  Goethe,  einen  Schopenhauer  be- 
sitzt,  dass  ist  schmerzlich."  —  "Ernst  Haeckel  als  Philosoph,"  in 
Preussische  Jahrbiichcr,  1900. 


HAECKEL'S  NEW   CALVINISM       79 

from  this  country.  And  not  only  has  the  book  been 
widely  bought,  but  it  has  been  seized  upon  as  a  sort 
of  new  gospel  by  immense  circles  of  the  working  class, 
who  seem,  for  some  unfathomable  reason,  to  regard  it 
as  a  message  of  good  tidings  and  great  joy  to  them. 
Multitudes  of  artisans  in  England  (I  limit  my  asser- 
tion to  England  because  only  there  can  I  speak  from 
first-hand  personal  knowledge)  have  studied  this  book 
with  the  same  kind  of  fervour  and  devotion  as  their 
forbears  gave  to  the  study  of  the  Bible.  They  have 
naturally  also  studied  it  just  as  unintelligently.  It  is 
known  to  many  who  have  hardly  ever  read  another 
serious  book  in  their  lives,  and  who  consequently  are 
entirely  unable  to  read  it  critically  or  form  any  ade- 
quate estimate  of  its  scientific  and  philosophic  value. 
The  result  is  that  although  the  book  is  scientifically 
old-fashioned  and  philosophically  beneath  contempt, 
it  is  yet  regarded  by  these  multitudinous  readers  as 
the  very  latest  and  maturest  wisdom  of  the  human 
spirit  —  as  being,  indeed,  what  its  author  modestly 
calls  it,  the  "ripe  fruit  of  the  tree  of  knowledge." 

The  qualities  which  explain  this  enormous  popu- 
larity are  not  difficult  to  detect.  In  the  first  place,  the 
book  is  written  with  great  pugnacity,  and  therefore 
cannot  fail  to  appeal  to  the  combative  instinct  which 
is  strong  in  us  all,  and  especially  in  the  mentally  im- 
disciplined.  It  abounds  in  sweeping  denunciations, 
not  only  of  priests  and  priestcraft,  but  of  leaders  in 
any  branch  of  knowledge  who  dare  to  suggest  that 


8o  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

there  are  or  can  be  in  the  universe  any  questions  that 
have  not  been  completely  answered  by  the  doctrine 
of  Darwin  —  more  particularly  as  developed  and 
transmogrified  by  the  prophet  of  Jena.  What  is  more, 
although  it  purports  to  deal  with  all  the  mysteries  of 
time  and  eternity,  of  matter  and  spirit,  and  either  to 
solve  or  to  point  the  way  to  the  solution  of  the  seven 
riddles  of  the  universe  which  still  remained  outstand- 
ing in  1899,  it  nevertheless  does  not  contain  a  single 
sentence  which  would  be  beyond  the  immediate  com- 
prehension of  any  intelligent  artisan,  as  soon  as  he  had 
mastered  the  glossary  which  is  thoughtfully  provided 
in  the  English  translation.  This  means  that  the  book 
unconsciously  flatters  the  vanity  of  the  illiterate.  It 
makes  them  think  that  their  previous  inability  to 
grasp  the  problems  of  philosophy  was  due  not  to  any 
shortcomings  of  their  own,  but  to  the  lack  of  lucidity 
in  the  writing  of  the  philosophers.  It  also  gives  them 
an  entirely  baseless  feeling  of  having  learned  a  great 
deal  and  gained  new  insight. 

In  no  other  way  can  one  explain  the  almost  raptur- 
ous eulogies  poured  out  upon  Haeckel  by  so  vari- 
ously gifted  a  man  as  Mr.  Robert  Blatchford,  the 
editor  of  a  bright  and  deservedly  popular  English 
Socialist  weekly  paper  called  the  "Clarion."  It  was 
to  the  "Clarion's"  trumpeting  that  the  success  of  the 
English  translation  of  "Die  Weltratsel"  was  mainly 
due.  About  the  time  when  Mr.  Blatchford's  first  art- 
icle upon  it  appeared,  I  read  an  interview  with  him. 


HAECKEL'S  NEW  CALVINISM      8i 

in  which  he  made  the  very  significant  admission  that 
he  could  not  imderstand  a  single  word  that  he  read  in 
Kant.  I  quote  him  from  memory,  and  therefore  with 
something  less  than  verbal  exactness,  but  I  am  quite 
certain  that  the  purport  of  his  remark  was  as  follows: 
"I  once  wasted  six  shillings  on  Kant's  Critique  of 
the  Pure  Reason/  and  after  an  hour  or  two  I  threw 
it  into  the  fire.  What  is  the  use  of  wasting  time 
over  such  a  ridiculous  and  unintelligible  metaphysical 
dream  ?  *' 

This  Httle  piece  of  frank  autobiography,  coming 
from  Mr.  Blatchford,  gives  us  the  clue  to  the  back- 
wardness of  the  masses  as  regards  philosophy,  and 
their  readiness  to  fall  down  and  worship  the  first 
glib  and  confident  pseudo-philosophic  charlatan  who 
chances  to  present  himself.  Kant  is  hard  to  read,  not 
only  because  of  his  seriously  defective  literary  style, 
but  also  because  he  had  a  first-hand  vision  of  the  un- 
plumbed  mysteries  which  surroimd  the  soul  of  man 
on  every  side.  Haeckel,  on  the  other  hand,  is  easy  to 
read,  because  he  wields  the  pen  of  a  ready  writer;  he 
never  pauses  to  make  subtle  distinctions  (but  only 
because  he  never  sees  them);  and  he  has  never  had 
any  glimpse  of  the  vision  of  mystery  which  haimted 
the  mind  of  Kant,  as  it  has  haunted  the  deepest  minds 
of  humanity,  from  before  the  days  of  Socrates  and 
Plato  down  to  the  days  of  Rudolf  Eucken  and  Henri 
Bergson.  To  quote  again  from  Paulsen's  essay, 
Haeckel,  ''since  Darwinism  solved  for  him  the  prob- 


82  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

lem  of  the  origin  of  species,  sees  no  more  problems,  but 
only  ready-made  solutions."  ^ 

The  success  of  Haeckel,  then,  is  exactly  like  that 
of  the  cheap- jack  Dr.  Schutzmacher,  in  Mr.  Bernard 
Shaw's  play  of  "The  Doctor's  Dilemma."  Schutz- 
macher, it  will  be  remembered,  having  begun  with 
no  capital,  had  piled  up  a  fortune  before  he  had 
reached  middle  life.  Asked  how  he  had  worked  this 
miracle,  he  repKed  that  it  had  been  done  by  painting 
upon  his  shop  window  the  words,  "Advice  and  medi- 
cine, sixpence.  Cure  guaranteed."  Obviously,  as  he 
says,  when  people  go  to  the  doctor  what  they  want  is 
a  cure,  and  so  of  course  they  will  go  in  greatest  num- 
bers to  the  man  who  is  ready  to  guarantee  them  what 
they  want.  Thus  it  is,  even  with  intelligent  working- 
men,  such  as  those  who  form  the  rank  and  file  of  the 
great  German  Social  Democratic  party,  the  English 
Independent  Labour  Party,  the  trade  unions,  and  the 
like.  These  men  (in  common  with  most  men  of  other 
classes)  have  but  slight  equipment  for  forming  an  in- 
telligent judgment  on  the  merits  of  a  book  which  pro- 
fesses to  explain  to  them  the  riddles  of  the  world,  just 
as  they  have  for  deciding  between  the  various  doctors 
who  seek  their  patronage.  Their  one  criterion,  natu- 
rally, apart  from  cheapness,  is  the  confidence  with 
which  their  patronage  is  claimed. 

^  "Er  sieht,  seitdem  ihm  der  Darwinismus  das  Problem  der  Ent- 
stehung  der  Arten  aufgelost  hat,  nirgends  mehr  Probleme,  sondern  nur 
bereite  Losungen." 


HAECKEL'S  NEW   CALVINISM       83 

Their  readiness  to  fall  into  the  snare  of  pseudo- 
philosophers  like  Haeckel  is  the  not  unjust  Nemesis 
of  the  neglect  of  the  human  intellect  by  the  Christian 
Church  through  eighteen  hundred  years.  Had  the 
Church  not  been  so  stupidly  convinced  that  there  was 
only  one  saviour  of  the  world  —  had  it  seen  that 
humanity  needed  the  method  and  secret  of  Socrates 
as  much  as  it  needed  the  method  and  secret  of  Jesus 
—  this  all-pervading  illiteracy  would  have  been  elim- 
inated centuries  ago.  As  it  is,  the  masses  are  indebted, 
and  know  themselves  to  be  indebted,  to  the  modern 
secular  spirit  even  for  the  rudimentary  education 
which  is  nowadays  given  to  them.  The  orthodox 
Church  has  been  not  only  indifferent  but  actively  and 
criminally  hostile  to  popular  education.  In  Europe 
to  this  day  orthodoxy  and  illiteracy  go  hand  in  hand 
together.  Popular  ignorance  and  popular  devotion  to 
the  Church  are  at  their  maximum  in  countries  like 
Russia,  Portugal,  Spain  and  Southern  Italy.  In  Eng- 
land, the  establishment  of  free  schools  by  the  Govern- 
ment was  achieved  in  the  teeth  of  every  kind  of  hos- 
tility, continued  through  decades,  on  the  part  of  the 
authorities  of  the  Established  Church,  which,  having 
set  up,  for  the  purpose  of  inculcating  its  doctrines, 
a  system  of  ''national"  schools,  utterly  inadequate  in 
accommodation  and  inefficient  in  secular  teaching, 
sought  to  prevent  the  allocation  of  public  funds  for  the 
establishment  or  support  of  any  other  schools.  And  at 
this  moment  the  British  public  schools  are  still  held 


84  CRITICISMS   OF   LIFE 

back,  cramped  and  thwarted,  and  the  national  educa- 
tional system  remains  disastrously  incomplete  and  in- 
efficient, because  of  the  insensate  squabble  between  the 
Tweedledum  of  Anglicanism  and  the  Tweedledee  of 
the  non-established  sects,  over  the  exact  form  of  dog- 
matic instruction  to  be  given  at  the  public  expense. 
Preachers  of  every  denomination  to-day  deplore  the 
violent  antagonism  of  the  working  classes  to  ortho- 
dox rehgion,  and,  too  late,  they  are  lamenting  the 
sway  of  writers  like  Haeckel  over  the  minds  of  these 
classes.  The  responsibiHty,  however,  lies  at  the  door 
of  the  Church,  which  has  always  been  the  educator  of 
the  nations  of  Europe,  and  therefore  cannot  disclaim 
culpability  for  the  miserable  results  of  its  agelong 
monopoly. 

What  the  preacher  chiefly  deplores  in  the  influence 
of  Professor  Haeckel  is  the  childish  materialism  which 
this  author  shares  with  and  intensifies  in  his  readers. 
But  this  is  only  an  illustration  of  the  Church's  long 
neglect  of  its  duty.  In  so  far  as  Haeckel  and  his  dis- 
ciples are  materialists,  they  are  in  no  wise  different 
from  the  mass  of  their  Christian  opponents.  For 
popular  Christianity  (as  distinguished  from  philo- 
sophic and  ethical  Christianity)  has  never  been  any- 
thing but  what  Matthew  Arnold  bluntly  but  accu- 
rately called  it:  a  materialistic  fairy-tale.  It  has 
perverted  and  petrified  the  metaphors  of  its  Founder 
into  hard,  literal  statements  of  fact.  Its  central  sacra- 
ment, the  Eucharist,  is  an  inexcusable  literalization 


HAECKEL'S   NEW   CALVINISM       85 

of  his  poetical  figures  of  speech.  It  has  never  taught 
men,  because  it  has  never  understood,  how  to  escape 
from  the  materialistic  point  of  view.  Its  hell  and 
heaven  of  physical  torment  and  delight,  its  fantastic 
doctrine  of  the  resurrection  of  the  body  (repeated 
every  day,  in  this  twentieth  century,  by  thousands 
of  priests  and  millions  of  laymen  who  know  it  to  be 
baseless  and  absurd),  its  Sultan-like  God  seated  on 
an  actual  throne,  enjoying  throughout  eternity  the 
flatteries  of  his  prostrate  worshippers  —  what  is  all 
this  but  a  stark  materialism,  on  the  mental  level  of 
savages  and  children? 

I  do  not  for  a  moment  deny  that  there  has  been, 
all  through  the  Christian  ages,  a  tiny  minority  of 
believers  who  appraised  this  fairy-tale  at  its  true 
worth;  but  the  Church  has  never  told  the  truth  to 
the  people,  and  it  refuses  to-day  to  tell  them  the 
truth,  although  the  results  of  its  persistence  in  hyp- 
notizing and  deceiving  them  are  visible  on  every  hand. 
Only  to-day  have  candidates  for  Anglican  ordination 
been  released  from  declaring  their  unfeigned  belief 
in  every  word  contained  in  the  canonical  scriptures  — 
a  declaration  which  nobody  outside  a  lunatic  asy- 
lum could  make  sincerely.  Within  the  last  few  years, 
two  English  Bishops  have  combined  to  inhibit  the 
Reverend  J.  M.  Thompson,  of  Magdalen  College, 
Oxford,  from  preaching,  because  he  had  dared  to  set 
forth,  in  his  excellent  volume  on  "Miracles  in  the 
New  Testament,"  the  truths,  undeniable  by  com- 


86  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

petent  scholars,  that  the  New  Testament  miracles  are 
devoid  of  evidence,  that  Jesus  Christ  never  claimed 
to  perform  miracles,  and  that  miracles  are,  in  any 
case,  entirely  worthless  as  evidence  to  anything  be- 
yond themselves. 

The  Churches,  then,  having  for  ages  imposed  on  the 
nations  one  huge  materialistic  myth,  have  no  right  to 
be  surprised  at  the  deplorable  fact  that  the  moment 
the  masses  break  loose  from  their  leading-strings, 
they  embrace  another  materiaHstic  myth.  Having 
been  lashed  into  unquestioning  docihty  to  one  Pope 
and  one  sacred  book,  they  escape  only  to  follow  a  fresh 
self-constituted  pope  and  to  believe  in  the  Hteral  in- 
spiration of  his  sacred  book.  Why  should  they  not? 
For  the  task  of  self -direction  they  have  never  had  any 
training  from  their  ecclesiastical  masters.  They  are 
like  the  three  milKon  so-called  free  voters  of  Mexico, 
ostensibly  entrusted  with  the  privileges  and  responsi- 
bilities of  republican  citizenship.  That  illiterate  na- 
tion, incapable  of  self-government,  is  doomed  either 
to  be  controlled  from  abroad  or  to  be  for  many  a  day 
the  shuttlecock  of  a  series  of  usurpers  of  the  type 
either  of  Porfirio  Diaz  or  of  Madero  and  Huerta. 
Exactly  so  is  it  in  the  proletarian  republic  of  letters 
and  of  religion.  Professor  Haeckel,  with  his  world- 
wide influence  and  his  transparent  incompetence,  is 
the  precise  analogue  of  a  Mexican  dictator. 

I  am  aware  that  HaeckeFs  English  translator,  in  a 
preface  to  the  fifth  English  edition,  declares  that  the 


HAECKEL'S   NEW   CALVINISM      87 

prophet  of  Jena  is  not  a  materialist.  "For  him/'  says 
Mr.  McCabe,  "mind  is  not  a  product  of  matter,  but 
something  developing  concurrently  with  matter."  The 
good  faith  of  the  assertion  need  not  be  questioned, 
because  Dr.  Haeckers  philosophic  oracles  are  a  per- 
petual seesaw  of  self-contradiction.  He  certainly  does 
say  in  one  place,  "We  hold,  with  Goethe,  that  ^matter 
cannot  exist  and  be  operative  without  spirit,  nor  spirit 
without  matter.'"  Such  an  assertion,  isolated  from 
its  context,  looks  impressive;  but  it  becomes  less  so 
when  we  find  in  the  very  next  sentence  that  the 
"spirit"  he  talks  about  is  identical  with  the  physical 
energy  of  the  inorganic  world.  It  is  a  mode  of  the 
very  same  force  which  is  otherwise  manifested  as 
gravitation,  electricity  and  the  Hke.  And  how  can  his 
translator  have  succeeded  in  forgetting  the  innumer- 
able sentences  of  imqualified  dogmatic  materialism 
which  he  himself  had  first  read  in  the  German  and 
then  faithfully  reproduced  in  English  ?  For  one  sen- 
tence which  seems  to  be  susceptible  of  an  idealistic 
or  dualistic  interpretation,  there  are  a  hundred  in 
every  chapter  which  absolutely  exclude  anything  but 
materialistic  monism.  In  turning  Haeckel's  pages 
one  drops  across  dozens  of  sentences  like  the  follow- 
ing. He  is  describing  the  brain  as  the  organ  of  con- 
sciousness, and,  having  depicted  the  "sense  centres," 
he  goes  on  to  talk  about  "the  four  great  thought 
centres,  or  centres  of  association,  the  real  organs  oj 
mental  life;  they  are  those  highest  instrimients  of 


88  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

psychic  activity  that  produce  thought  and  con- 
sciousness." ^  These  are  the  words  of  the  writer 
whose  translator,  in  a  preface  to  the  book  containing 
them,  declares  that  he  does  not  regard  mind  as  a 
product  of  matter!  Yet  thought  and  consciousness 
are  produced  by  the  thought  centres  of  the  brain! 
Comment  would  perhaps  not  be  superfluous,  if  only 
it  were  not  impossible. 

This  philosopher  who  is  not  a  materialist,  and  does 
not  regard  mind  as  a  product  of  body,  writes  elsewhere 
(in  his  chapter  on  "The  Evolution  of  the  World") 
the  following  profound  summary  of  his  new  gospel  of 
hope  and  inspiration  for  the  masses:  — 

It  seems  to  me  that  these  modem  discoveries  as  to  the 
periodic  decay  and  re-birth  of  cosmic  bodies,  which  we 
owe  to  the  most  recent  advance  of  physics  and  astronomy, 
associated  with  the  law  of  substance,  are  especially  im- 
portant in  giving  us  a  clear  insight  into  the  universal 
cosmic  process  of  evolution.  In  their  light  our  earth 
shrinks  into  the  slender  proportions  of  a  "mote  in  the 
sunbeam,"  of  which  unnumbered  millions  chase  each 
other  through  the  vast  depths  of  space.  Our  own  "hu- 
man nature,"  which  exalted  itself  into  an  image  of  God 
in  its  anthropistic  illusion,  sinks  to  the  level  of  that  of  a 
placental  mammal,  which  has  no  more  value  for  the  uni- 
verse at  large  than  the  ant,  the  fly  of  a  summer's  day, 
the  microscopic  infusorium,  or  the  smallest  bacillus. 
Humanity  is  but  sl  transitory  phase  of  the  evolution  of 
the  eternal  substance,  a  particular  phenomenal  form  of 
matter  and  energy y  the  true  proportion  of  which  we  soon 

^  Die  Weltrdtsel,  chap,  x,  p.  65  of  sth  English  edition. 


HAECKEL'S  NEW   CALVINISM       89 

perceive  when  we  set  it  on  the  background  of  infinite 
space  and  eternal  time.^ 

It  will  perhaps  not  be  superfluous  if  we  take  a  glance 
at  the  marvellous  process  of  reasoning  which  leads 
up  to  this  triumphant  demonstration  of  the  nothing- 
ness of  man,  who  is  thus  declared  to  be  only  a  form  of 
matter  and  physical  energy.  It  is  well  to  remind  the 
reader  that  Haeckel  —  although,  like  Sir  Ray  Lan- 
kester,  Mr.  Hugh  Elliot,  and  indeed  all  his  followers, 
he  is  perpetually  sneering  at  the  philosophers  —  pro- 
fesses in  this  work  to  be  speaking  as  a  philosopher. 
This  school  thinks  and  says  repeatedly  that  all  the 
metaphysicians,  from  Plato  downwards,  have  contrib- 

*  My  quotation  is  taken,  with  only  two  small  corrections,  from  Mr. 
Joseph  McCabe's  English  translation.  The  italics  are  mine.  In  order, 
however,  that  the  reader  may  see  how  even  more  pessimistic  and 
materialistic  Haeckel  is  than  his  excessively  loyal  English  advocate 
makes  him  seem,  I  append  the  paragraph  in  the  original :  — 

"Besonders  wichtig  fiir  die  klare  Einsicht  in  den  universalen  kos- 
mischen  Entwickelungsprozess  sind  diese  modernen  Vorstellungen 
iiber  periodisch  wechselnden  Untergang  und  Neubildung  der  Welt- 
korper.  Unsere  Mutter  Erde  schrumpft  dabei  auf  den  Wert  eines 
winzigen  *  Sonnenstaubchens'  zusammen,  wie  deren  ungezahlte  Mil- 
lionen  im  unendlichen  Weltenraum  umherjagen.  Unser  eigenes 
'Menschenwesen,'  welches  in  seinem  anthropistischen  Grossenwahn 
sich  ais  'Ebenbild  Gottes'  verherrlicht,  sinkt  zur  Bedeutung  eines 
plazentalen  Saugetieres  hinab,  welches  nicht  mehr  Wert  fiir  das  ganze 
Universum  besitzt  als  die  Ameise  und  die  Eintagsfliege,  als  das 
mikroskopische  Infusorium  und  der  winzigste  Bazillus.  Auch  wir 
Menschen  sind  nur  voriibergehende  Entwickelungszustande  der 
ewigen  Substanz,  individuelle  Erscheinungsformen  der  Materia  und 
Energie,  deren  Nichiigkeit  wir  begreif  en,  wenn  wir  sie  dem  unendlichen 
Raum  und  der  ewigen  Zeit  gegeniiberstellen." 

That  word  "  Nichtigkeit "  was  more  than  even  Mr.  McCabe  could 
stand.  He  has  softened  Haeckel's  assertion  of  the  nothingness  of 
humanity  into  the  phrase,  "the  true  proportion  of  which  we  soon 
perceive,"  etc. 


go  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

uted  nothing  of  the  slightest  value  to  human  thought 
or  human  life.  It  thinks  that  metaphysics,  together 
with  orthodox  theology,  should  be  relegated  to  the 
cosmic  lumber-room,  along  with  all  the  other  outgrown 
superstitions  of  the  childhood  of  the  race.  Yet,  de- 
spite the  preposterous  inconsistency  of  this  attitude 
with  Haeckel's  own  pretensions  to  found  a  philo- 
sophic system,  it  is  about  this  latter  pretension  that 
he  is  concerned.  In  the  original,  his  work  bears  the 
sub-title,  "  Gemeinverstandliche  Studien  iiber  monis- 
tische  Philosophic."  The  English  version  changes  the 
main  title  and  omits  the  sub-title  altogether. 

My  purpose  renders  it  necessary  to  insist  upon  this 
aspect  of  Haeckel's  book.  This  teacher,  who  in  philo- 
sophy is  everything  by  turns  and  nothing  long;  who, 
without  knowing  it,  is  successively  idealist,  materialist, 
dualist  and  monist;  who  undertakes,  with  the  cock- 
sure confidence  of  a  city  schoolboy,  to  derive  the  sub- 
ject from  the  object,  and  thereby  to  annihilate  the 
spiritual  self-determination  of  mankind,  is,  in  spite  of 
his  scorn  for  metaphysics,  himself  a  metaphysician. 
He  has  his  own  theory  of  the  relation  of  thought  to 
being,  and  of  the  genesis,  nature  and  limitations  of 
human  knowledge.  If  he  spoke  merely  as  a  specialist 
in  biology,  and  confined  himself  to  statements  veri- 
fiable by  the  methods  of  that  science,  it  would  be 
beyond  my  competence  to  deal  with  him.  He  is  emi- 
nent in  his  own  special  field,  and  he  made,  many  years 
ago,  important  and  valuable  additions  to  our  bio- 


HAECKEL'S   NEW   CALVINISM       91 

logical  knowledge.  But  he  is  not  satisfied  with  the 
reputation  which  entitles  him  to  speak  as  one  having 
authority  about  sea-squirts  and  radiolaria.  He  must 
needs  lay  down  the  law  to  us,  not  only  about  all  the 
physical  sciences,  but  also  about  comparative  reli- 
gion. Biblical  criticism,  Christian[origins,  epistemology, 
and  a  dozen  other  subjects  of  which  he  knows  prac- 
tically nothing,  and  the  fundamental  principles  of 
which  he  shows  himself  incapable  of  imderstanding. 
Lest  this  criticism  seem  too  sweeping,  let  me  illus- 
trate it  by  a  single  instance.  The  earlier  editions  of 
the  ^'Riddles  of  the  Universe,"  in  English  as  well  as 
German,  contained  a  chapter  on  "Science  and  Chris- 
tianity," in  which  Professor  Haeckel  undertook  to 
inform  his  popular  audience  about  Christian  origins, 
the  formation  of  the  Gospel  canon,  and  a  number  of 
kindred  matters.  His  presentation  of  these  was  so 
tasteless,  illiterate  and  untrue  that  the  whole  section 
had  afterwards  to  be  rewritten  for  him  by  his  English 
translator.  Prior  to  this  kindly  doctoring  —  that  is, 
at  the  time  when  Haeckel's  book  was  written  by  him- 
self and  not  by  somebody  else  —  it  contained  the  fol- 
lowing learned  description  of  the  formation  of  the 
canon  of  the  Gospels:  — 

As  to  the  four  canonical  Gospels,  we  now  know  that 
they  were  selected  from  a  host  of  contradictory  and 
forged  manuscripts  of  the  first  three  centuries  by  the 
three  hundred  and  eighteen  Bishops  who  assembled  at 
the  Council  of  Nicaea  in  327.  The  entire  list  of  Gospels 


92  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

numbered  forty;  the  canonical  list  contains  four.  As  the 
contending  and  mutually  abusive  Bishops  could  not 
agree  about  the  choice,  they  determined  to  leave  the 
selection  to  a  miracle.  They  put  all  the  books  (accord- 
ing to  the  "Synodicon"  of  Pappus)  together  under- 
neath the  altar,  and  prayed  that  the  apocr3rphal  books 
of  human  origin  might  remain  there,  and  the  genuine 
inspired  books  might  be  miraculously  placed  on  the 
table  of  the  Lord.  And  that,  says  tradition,  really  oc- 
curred! The  three  synoptic  Gospels  (Matthew,  Mark 
and  Luke  —  all  written  after  them,  not  by  them,  at  the 
beginning  of  the  second  century)  and  the  very  different 
fourth  Gospel  (ostensibly  "after"  John,  written  about 
the  middle  of  the  second  century)  leaped  on  the  table, 
and  were  thenceforth  recognized  as  the  inspired  (with 
their  thousand  mutual  contradictions)  foundations  of 
Christian  doctrine.^ 

It  is  scarcely  necessary  to  say  that  this  farrago  of 
ignorant  nonsense  was  not  allowed  to  pass  unchal- 
lenged in  Germany.  Professor  Friedrich  Loofs  of 
Halle  promptly  denounced  Haeckel,  and  in  doing  so 
deliberately  chose  such  language  as  would  make  it 
possible  for  Haeckel,  if  he  so  desired,  to  prosecute  his 
critic  for  libel.  This  Haeckel  never  thought  fit  to  do; 
but  the  controversy  disclosed  the  interesting  fact  that 
the  whole  of  his  information  about  early  Christianity 
and  the  development  of  the  Church  had  been  derived 
from  a  tenth-rate  ^'free-thought"  book  by  an  obscure 
English  journalist,  of  which  the  German  translation 

*  Op.  cit.y  chap,  xvn,  pp.  319-20,  English  translation,  2d  edition, 

XQOI. 


HAECKEL'S  NEW   CALVINISM       93 

was  even  worse  than  the  original.  No  such  crushing 
exposure  of  presumptuous  ignorance  was  ever  made 
before  in  the  case  of  a  man  of  academic  training  and 
career,  who  had  won  for  himself  deserved  honours  in 
his  own  field. 

I  met  in  Jena  in  1909  some  imiversity  students 
who,  having  formerly  been  enthusiastic  disciples  of 
Haeckel,  had  abandoned  their  allegiance  in  disgust 
because  they  were  convinced  that  he  had  deliberately 
"faked"  some  of  the  pictures  which  illustrated  his 
chapters  on  human  phylogeny  and  embryology.  But 
I  know  of  no  reason  for  suspecting  him  of  bad  faith. 
All  his  amazing  oracles  can  be  sufficiently  accounted 
for  by  the  hypothesis  of  ignorance  and  overweening 
self-confidence. 

Onejs,  however,  in  a  position  to  state  that  the 
information  which  he  gives  his  readers  about  the  opin- 
ions of  Kant,  Spinoza  and  Berkeley  is  exactly  as  valu- 
able as  what  he  tells  them  about  the  dates  of  com- 
position and  method  of  ecclesiastical  selection  of  the 
four  Gospels.  The  myth  of  the  leaping  Gospels  he  had 
picked  up  somewhere;  but  he  has  invented,  out  of  his 
own  head,  the  following  myth  about  Immanuel  Kant, 
which  to  students  of  philosophy  will  be  equally  amus- 
ing:— 

The  great  majority  of  philosophers  and  theologians 
affirm,  with  Kant,  that  the  moral  world  is  quite  inde- 
pendent of  the  physical,  and  is  subject  to  very  different 
laws;  hence,  a  man's  conscience,  as  the  basis  of  his  moral 


94  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

life,  must  also  be  quite  independent  of  our  scientific 
knowledge  of  the  world,  and  must  be  based  rather  on 
his  religious  faith.  On  that  theory  the  study  of  the  moral 
world  belongs  to  practical  reason,  while  that  of  nature, 
or  of  the  physical  world,  is  referred  to  pure  or  theoret- 
ical reason.  This  unequivocal  and  conscious  dualism  of 
Kant's  philosophy  was  its  greatest  defect;  it  has  caused, 
and  still  causes,  incalculable  mischief.  First  of  all  the 
"critical  Kant"  had  built  up  the  splendid  and  marvel- 
lous palace  of  pure  reason,  and  convincingly  proved  that 
the  three  great  central  dogmas  of  metaphysics  —  a 
personal  God,  free  will,  and  the  immortal  soul  —  had 
no  place  whatever  in  it,  and  that  no  rational  proof  could 
be  found  of  their  reality.  Afterwards,  however,  the 
"dogmatic  Kant"  superimposed  on  this  true  crystal 
palace  of  pure  reason  the  glittering,  ideal  castle  in  the 
air  of  practical  reason,  in  which  three  imposing  church- 
naves  were  designed  for  the  accommodation  of  those 
three  great  mystic  divinities.  When  they  had  been  put 
out  at  the  front  door  by  rational  knowledge  they  re- 
turned by  the  back  door  under  the  guidance  of  irrational 
faith.i 

This  contrast  between  the  critical  and  the  dogma- 
tic Kant,  who  in  his  capacity  of  dogmatist  declared 
the  moral  world  independent  of  the  physical,  and  taught 
that  conscience  must  be  based  on  religious  faith;  who 
superimposed  a  glittering  castle  on  top  of  a  crystal 
palace,  and  stuck  three  church -naves  (with  back 
doors)  into  the  former,  is  a  precious  addition  to  our 
knowledge  of  the  philosopher  of  Konigsberg.  Not 
less  delicious  is  the  information  as  to  the  delimitation 
^  Op.  cit.,  chap.  XIX,  p.  123,  5th  English  edition. 


HAECKEL'S  NEW  CALVINISM      95 

of  the  spheres  of  pure  and  practical  reason.  It  teaches 
us  at  least  one  thing:  that  Professor  Ernst  Haeckel 
has  not  the  faintest  glimmering  of  what  Kant  meant 
by  the  pure  reason  and  the  distinction  between  it  and 
the  practical  reason.  He  obviously  thinks  that  Kant 
held  successively  —  at  different  periods  of  his  life  — 
the  doctrine  which  got  rid  of  God,  freedom  and  im- 
mortality, and  that  which  reinstated  them.  He  does 
not  know  that  Kant's  work  was  the  destruction  of 
dogmas  as  dogmas  —  the  eradication  of  the  dogmatic 
spirit  and  of  the  pseudo-rationalism  of  the  older 
metaphysics.  While  doing  this,  however,  Kant  re- 
tained the  doctrines  of  God,  freedom  and  immortaHty 
with  the  different  status  of  postulates  of  the  practical 
reason,  or,  as  we  should  nowadays  say,  pragmatic  as- 
sumptions. They  are  not  demonstrable,  but  neither 
are  they  disprovable;  and  (so  Kant  thought)  they 
serve  to  justify  the  intuitions  of  conscience.  But 
could  there  be  a  more  outrageous  perversion  of  truth 
than  the  statement  that  Kant,  of  all  people,  taught 
that  conscience  "must  be  based  on  reHgious  faith"? 
Kant,  who  in  the  plainest  language  taught  the  pre- 
cise opposite  —  that  religious  faith  must  be  based  on 
conscience  —  and  declared  that  even  God  and  Christ 
can  only  be  called  good  in  so  far  as  they  correspond 
to  the  ideal  of  perfection  which  is  inherent  in  the 
nature  of  man!  ^  Such  passages  enable  one  to  under- 
stand the  '^burning  shame"  with  which  a  real  philo- 
*  Vide  Kant,  Groundwork  of  the  Metapkysic  of  Ethics,  chap.  n. 


g6  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

sopher  like  Professor  Paulsen  observed  the  growing 
popularity  of  HaeckeFs  book. 

Another  amusing  instance  of  our  monistic  philo- 
sopher's insight  is  afforded  by  his  presentation  of  the 
doctrine  of  Spinoza,  with  which  he  professes  to  iden- 
tify himself.  Spinoza,  as  we  know,  held  that  the  one 
universal  reality  manifests  itself  to  us  under  the  two 
aspects  of  mind  and  body.  He  held  the  theory  of 
psycho-physical  parallelism,  from  which,  among  other 
consequences,  it  follows  that  interaction  between 
mind  and  brain  is  unthinkable.  Professor  Haeckel 
makes  a  parade  of  accepting  this  doctrine,  but  in  the 
very  sentence  in  which  he  does  so,  he  reduces  it  to 
nonsense  by  identifying  mind  with  physical  force. 
And,  as  we  have  already  seen,  instead  of  standing 
consistently  by  his  doctrine  of  psycho-physical  paral- 
lelism (which  would  bar  him  out  completely  from 
denying  immortality  and  the  freedom  of  the  will), 
he  flops  over  to  the  notion  of  the  influxus  physicus. 
We  have  already  ^  caught  him  declaring  that  the  brain 
produces  thought  and  consciousness.  These  element- 
ary self-contradictions  are,  as  we  have  said,  not  a 
proof  of  bad  faith.  His  only  fault  ("and  that  is  faults 
enough"!)  is  an  incurable  propensity  to  lay  down  the 
law  about  things  of  which  he  knows  nothing,  with 
even  more  than  the  excessive  confidence  he  displays 
in  expounding  that  branch  of  knowledge  which  is  his 
special  field. 

1  Ante,  p.  88. 


HAECKEL'S  NEW   CALVINISM       97 

A  man  can  believe  either  in  psycho-physical  paral- 
lelism or  in  physico-psychical  interactionism,  just  as 
he  can  believe  either  that  the  earth  is  spherical  or  that 
it  is  flat;  but  it  was  reserved  for  this  solver  of  the 
riddles  of  the  imiverse  at  the  end  of  the  nineteenth 
century  to  hold  both  views  simultaneously,  without 
perceiving  the  difference  between  them. 

Professor  HaeckeFs  philosophic  competence  in  dis- 
cussing and  solving  his  celebrated  troupe  of  seven 
world-riddles  is  such  as  the  foregoing  might  naturally 
lead  us  to  anticipate.  The  riddles  in  question  he  takes 
over  from  du  Bois  -  Reymond,  who  had  enumerated 
them  as  follows:  — 

(i)  The  nature  of  matter  and  force, 

(2)  The  origin  of  motion. 

(3)  The  origin  of  life. 

(4)  The  (apparently  pre-ordained)  orderly  arrange- 
ment of  nature. 

(5)  The  origin  of  simple  sensation  and  consciousness. 

(6)  Rational  thought,  and  the  origin  of  the  cognate 
faculty,  speech. 

(7)  The  question  of  the  freedom  of  the  will. 
Professor  Haeckel,  unabashed  by  these  enigmas, 

which  have  baffled  the  mind  of  man  from  the  begin- 
ning, and  some  at  least  of  which  will  certainly  con- 
tinue until  the  end  of  time  to  baffle  all  who  are  capable 
of  seeing  the  problems  they  involve,  disposes  of  the 
whole  septette  by  the  ready  and  easy  method  of  deny- 
ing their  existence:  — 


98  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

In  my  opinion,  the  three  transcendental  problems 
(i,  2  and  5)  are  settled  by  our  conception  of  substance 
{vide  chap,  xn) ;  the  three  which  he  [du  Bois-Reymond] 
considers  difficult,  though  soluble  (3,  4  and  6)  are  de- 
cisively answered  by  our  modern  theory  of  evolution; 
the  seventh  and  last,  the  freedom  of  the  will,  is  not 
an  object  for  critical,  scientific  inquiry  at  all,  for  it  is 
a  pure  dogma,  based  on  an  illusion,  and  has  no  real 
existence.^ 

Ecclesia  locuta  est;  causa  finita  est  I  The  oracle  of 
Jena  has  wrapped  his  pontifical  mantle  about  him  and 
delivered  himself  officially  of  the  utterance  ex  cathedra 
which  is  henceforth  to  be  binding  on  all  the  faithful. 
Yet  stay!  We  have  still  one  question  left:  what  is 
"our  conception  of  substance  {vide  chap,  xii) "  ?  With 
pardonable  impatience  we  turn  in  quest  of  the  revela- 
tion that  "settles"  the  three  transcendental  problems 
of  the  nature  of  matter  and  force,  the  origin  of  motion, 
and  the  origin  of  simple  sensation  and  consciousness. 
What  do  we  find  ? 

After  telling  us  that,  in  his  opinion,  the  "law  of 
substance"  is  "the  true  and  only  cosmological  law," 
Professor  Haeckel  proceeds  to  explain  that  this  true 
and  only  law  consists  of  two  other  laws.  The  strik- 
ing resemblance  of  this  threefold  unity  to  the  Athana- 
sian  Trinity  cannot  fail  to  impress  itself  upon  reverent 
readers.  We  are  offered  one  supreme  and  all-per- 
vading law  which  does  not  itself  relate  to  any  data 
of  experience  whatever,  but  proceeds,  apparently  by 
*  Op.  cit.,  chap.  I,  p.  6,  English  translation,  sth  edition. 


HAECKEL'S  NEW   CALVINISM      99 

eternal  and  transcendental  self-generation,  from  two 
of  the  presuppositions  of  empirical  science.  These  are 
the  chemical  law  of  the  conservation  of  matter,  and 
the  physical  law  of  the  conservation  of  energy.  As 
some  hardy  heretics  still  venture  to  dispute  that  these 
are  "essentially  inseparable,^'  our  philosopher  pro- 
ceeds to  furnish  the  '^  proof "  of  his  thesis  in  the  fol- 
lowing paragraph:  — 

The  conviction  that  these  two  great  cosmic  theorems, 
the  chemical  law  of  the  persistence  of  matter  and  the 
physical  law  of  the  persistence  of  force,  are  fundamentally 
one,  is  of  the  utmost  importance  in  our  monistic  system. 
The  two  theories  are  just  as  intimately  united  as  their 
objects  —  matter  and  force  or  energy.  Indeed,  this 
fundamental  unity  of  the  two  laws  is  self-evident  to 
many  monistic  scientists  and  philosophers,  since  they 
merely  relate  to  two  different  aspects  of  one  and  the 
same  object,  the  cosmos.  But,  however  natural  the 
thought  may  be,  it  is  still  very  far  from  being  generally 
accepted.  It  is  stoutly  contested  by  the  entire  dualistic 
philosophy,  vitalistic  biology,  and  parallelistic  psy- 
chology; even,  in  fact,  by  a  few  (inconsistent)  monists, 
who  think  they  find  a  check  to  it  in  "consciousness," 
in  the  higher  mental  activity  of.  man,  or  in  other  phe- 
nomena of  our  "free  mental  life." 

For  my  part,  I  am  convinced  of  the  profound  import- 
ance of  the  unifying  "law  of  substance,"  as  an  expres- 
sion of  the  inseparable  connection  in  reality  of  two  laws 
which  are  only  separated  in  conception.^ 

I  assume  that  the  foregoing  quotation  constitutes 

^  Op.  ciL,  chap,  xii,  p.  76,  English  translation,  5th  edition. 


loo  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

the  promised  proof,  because  there  is  nothing  else  in 
the  entire  chapter  in  the  way  of  evidence  for  the  thesis. 
The  merely  lay  mind  will  not  be  able,  I  am  aware,  to 
find  in  the  above  passage  any  proof  of  this  supreme 
and  all- pervading  "law  of  substance"  which  Pro- 
fessor Haeckel  has  created  out  of  nothing.  It  may  be 
unduly  temerarious  to  analyze  the  dicta  of  infallible 
authority,  but,  even  at  the]  risk  of  excommunication 
from  Dr.  Haeckel's  new  monistic  Church,  one  must 
point  out  the  utter  baselessness  of  his  claim.  He  has 
invented,  and  promulgated  without  any  evidence, 
his  wonderful  new  law,  merely  in  order  to  buttress 
the  card-castle  of  his  a  priori  philosophic  structure. 
The  law  is,  he  tells  us,  "of  the  utmost  importance  in 
our  monistic  system.''  The  ensuing  assertion  that  the 
two  laws  must  be  fundamentally  one,  "since  they 
merely  relate  to  two  different  aspects  of  one  and  the 
same  object,  the  cosmos, ^^  is  so  breath-bereaving  that 
one  turns  hastily  to  the  German  original,  to  discover 
whether  Dr.  Haeckel's  meaning  has  not  been  uncon- 
sciously distorted  by  printer  or  translator.  But  no! 
the  "Hibernianism"  is  Haeckel's  own:  —  "Beide 
nur  zwei  verschiedene  Seiten  eines  und  desselben 
Objekts,  des  'Kosmos,'  betreffen."  Was  ever  such  a 
reason  given,  not  merely  for  declaring  the  basic 
identity  of  two  natural  laws,  but  for  erecting  the  two 
into  three  and  then  declaring  that  these  three  are  one  ? 
Will  Professor  Haeckel  condescend  to  inform  us  of 
any  two  or  more  natural  laws  which  do  not  relate  to 


HAECKEL'S  NEW  CALVINISM    loi 

"different  aspects  of  one  and  the  same  object,  the 
cosmos ""?  On  the  same  ground,  we  should  be  justified 
in  affirming  the  fimdamental  imity  of  the  law  of  gravi- 
tation and  the  American  Tariff  Act.  Would  anybody 
except  Haeckel  ever  dream  of  implying  that  fifty 
different  scientific  generalizations  may  relate  to  fifty 
different  worlds  of  experience  ?  Instead  of  making  his 
one  universal  fimdamental  law  out  of  these  two  prin- 
ciples alone,  he  ought  to  have  raked  together  all  the 
laws  that  ever  were  formulated,  and  fused  the  lot  into 
one  comprehensive  hypostatized  abstraction,  "with- 
out body,  parts  or  passions." 

And  who  are  these  wonderful  dualistic  philoso- 
phers, vitalistic  biologists,  parallelistic  psychologists, 
and  inconsistent  monists  who  deny  that  the  law  of 
the  conservation  of  energy  and  that  of  the  indestructi- 
bility of  matter  are  inseparably  connected  in  reality  ? 
They  do  not  exist;  they  are  not  there.  Professor 
Haeckel  has  conjured  them  up  out  of  his  own  super- 
heated imagination. 

Nor  does  the  principle  of  the  conservation  of  energy 
interfere  with  any  psychological  or  philosophical 
theory  of  consciousness^  except  the  untenable  one  to 
which  Professor  Haeckel,  contradicting  his  claim  to 
be  a  monist,  has  committed  himself  —  that,  namely, 
of  interactionism.  Of  course,  if  a  physical  impulsion, 
traced  from  the  outer  world  to  the  periphery  of  the 
human  body,  and  thence  by  the  afferent  nerves  to  the 
brain,  could  there  be  shown  to  be  suddenly  metamor- 


I02  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

phosed  into  a  state  of  consciousness,  this  would  be 
equivalent,  from  the  scientific  point  of  view,  to  a 
miraculous  disappearance  or  destruction  of  energy. 
But  no  such  metamorphosis  ever  takes  place,  and  no 
philosophy  except  materialism  necessitates  the  hj^o- 
thesis  that  it  does.  The  whole  muddle  arises  from  Dr. 
Haeckel's  preposterous  identification  of  consciousness 
with  physical  force. 

We  have  quoted  above  the  paragraph  in  which 
Professor  Haeckel  declares  that,  of  the  seven  world- 
riddles,  six  are  already  solved  and  the  seventh  is  a 
pure  illusion.  But  the  passage  cited  was  only  an  ap- 
pendix to  a  series  of  pronoimcements  which  are  pre- 
sumably to  be  understood  as  justifying  it.  Our  philo- 
sopher tells  us  that  "  not  only  the  three  anthropistic 
dogmas,  but  many  other  notions  of  the  duahstic  philo- 
sophy and  orthodox  religion,  are  foimd  to  be  unten- 
able as  soon  as  we  regard  them  critically  from  the 
cosmological  perspective  of  our  monistic  system."  ^ 
This  procession  of  polysyllables  sounds  impressive, 
but  all  it  means  is  that  the  notions  in  question  are 
found  to  be  untenable  the  moment  we  arbitrarily 
adopt  a  set  of  unverifiable  first  principles  with  which 
they  are  incompatible.  He  then  proceeds  to  formulate 
such  assumptions.  I  have  not  space  to  quote  them  at 
length,  but  I  will  give  a  specimen,  to  show  how  this 
novel  philosophy  first  takes  for  granted  everything 
that  it  ought  to  prove,  and  then  gets  rid  of  rival  philo- 

*  Op.  cit.,  chap.  I,  p.  5,  English  translation,  5th  edition. 


HAECKEUS  NEW   CALVINISM     103 

Sophies  by  the  simple  expedient  of  showing  their  in- 
consistency with  its  own  initial  assumptions.  Haeckel 
begins  in  the  following  fashion:  — 

(i)  The  universe,  or  the  cosmos,  is  eternal,  infinite 
and  illimitable.  (2)  Its  substance,  with  its  two  attri- 
butes (matter  and  energy),  fills  infinite  space  and  is  in 
eternal  motion. 

Here  we  have  a  new  creation  —  a  "substance** 
which  is  neither  matter  nor  energy  nor  yet  spirit,  but 
to  which  matter  and  energy  are  both  adjectival.  And 
this  is  "monism"! 

Having  thus  set  out  with  a  huge  bundle  of  self- 
contradictory  petitiones  principiij  the  philosopher  of 
course  has  no  hesitation  or  difficulty  in  deducing  from 
them  his  machine-made  world  of  mere  chemical  and 
physical  causation,  in  which  there  is  no  room  for  con- 
sciousness or  freedom.  There  never  was  a  more  glar- 
ing instance  of  the  blunder  of  which  Professor  Bergson 
accuses  Herbert  Spencer.  Bergson's  characterization 
of  Spencer's  evolutionism  is,  indeed,  a  thousand  times 
truer  of  Haeckel's  —  viz.,  that  it  "consists  in  cutting 
up  present  reality,  already  evolved,  into  little  bits 
no  less  evolved,  and  then  recomposing  it  with  these 
fragments,  thus  positing  in  advance  everything  that 
is  to  be  explained."  ^  It  is  thus  that  Haeckel  gets 
rid  of  the  problem  of  the  origin  of  the  universe,  by 
saying  that  it  "has  no  beginning  and  no  end;  it  is 

*  Creative  Evolution,  English  translation,  Introduction,  pp.  xiii- 
liv. 


I04  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

eternity."  And  with  respect  to  the  origin  of  motion 
(which  is  really  still  as  mysterious  for  us  as  it  was  for 
Aristotle)  he  calmly  lays  it  down  that  "movement  is 
as  innate  and  original  a  property  of  substance  as  is 
sensation.'^ 

The  student  unaccustomed  to  Professor  Haeckel's 
peculiarities  will  naturally  gasp  at  the  assertion  — 
made  as  though  it  were  self-evident  —  that  sensation 
is  an  innate  and  original  property  of  substance.  We 
ask  him,  however,  to  control  his  astonishment  for  the 
moment.  The  mystery  will  be  explained  a  little  later. 
He  need  not  be  impatient,  for  we  are  getting  along 
pretty  fast.  We  have  already  got  the  origin  of  the 
cosmos  and  the  origin  of  motion  cleared  up  in  a  couple 
of  sentences.  Now  for  the  problem  of  the  origin  of 
life. 

In  chapter  xrv,  abiogenesis,  or  the  development  of 
life  from  non-life,  is  proclaimed,  as  it  had  been  pro- 
claimed earlier  in  the  fourth  chapter  of  HaeckeFs 
"Evolution  of  Man."  Again,  in  chapter  xx  of  "Die 
Weltratsel,"  Haeckel  tells  us  that  the  monera  "arise 
by  spontaneous  generation  from  .  .  .  inorganic  nitro- 
carbonates."  He  is  careful  to  restrict  this  miracle  to 
"the  first  development  of  living  protoplasm  out  of 
inorganic  carbonates,"  ^  thus  getting  rid  in  advance 
of  the  embarrassing  request  that  he  should  describe, 
or  reproduce  in  his  laboratory,  the  process  by  which 
living  organisms  are  self-made  out  of  dead  matter. 

1  Riddles,  chap,  xiv,  p.  91,  English  translation,  5th  edition. 


HAECKEL'S  NEW   CALVINISM     105 

But  in  case  anybody  is  not  satisfied  with  this  Topsy's 
explanation,  our  solver  of  world  -  riddles  generously 
provides  us  with  an  alternative,  according  to  which 
we  are  to  suppose  that  the  distinctive  attributes  of 
life  —  sensation  and  desire  —  are  universal  properties 
of  all  material  substance  whatsoever.  He  even  talks  ^ 
of  the  "psychology"  of  atoms,  and  informs  us  that 
"every  shade  of  inclination,  from  complete  indifference 
to  the  fiercest  passion,  is  exemplified  in  the  chemical 
relation  of  the  various  elements  towards  each  other, 
just  as  we  find  in  the  psychology  of  man,  and  espe- 
cially in  the  Hfe  of  the  sexes."  A  few  sentences  further 
on  ^  we  are  informed  that  "even  the  atom  is  not  with- 
out a  rudimentary  form  of  sensation  and  will,  or,  as 
it  is  better  expressed,  of  feeling  (cesthesis)  and  inclina- 
tion (tropesis)  —  that  is,  a  universal  ^souF  of  the 
simplest  character." 

Thus  gently  and  seductively  is  the  inquiring  mind 
of  man  lulled  to  sleep  in  the  arms  of  the  all-embracing 
"law  of  substance."  Benignly  accommodating  himself 
to  the  frailties  of  human  nature,  Professor  Haeckel  pro- 
vides us  with  two  distinct  (and  mutually  destructive) 
versions  of  the  origin  of  life.  According  to  one  of  these, 
life  begins  of  itself,  by  an  inconceivable  process,  at 
an  \mknown  time,  and  under  unimaginable  conditions. 
According  to  the  other,  it  never  begins  at  all,  being 
coextensive  with  the  fimdamental  properties  of  the 
eternal  substance,  which,  as  we  have  already  learned, 

*  Riddles,  p.  79,  5th  English  editiou.  '  Ibid.,  p.  80. 


io6  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

fills  infinite  space  and  is  without  beginning  or  end 
in  time.  It  takes  the  giant  mind  of  a  Haeckel  to 
be  able  to  hold  both  these  antithetical  beliefs  simul- 
taneously; but  we  of  feebler  powers  are  not  constrained 
to  attempt  so  magnificent  a  feat.  We  can  make  a 
Pascalian  wager,  and  decide  between  the  rival  claim- 
ants on  our  faith  by  the  simple  process  of  tossing  up 
a  coin:  heads,  abiogenesis;  tails,  the  soul  of  the  atom! 
We  need  not  bother  about  the  lack  of  evidence  for  the 
winner,  for  both  the  doctrines  have  exactly  the  same 
amount  of  evidence  in  their  favour  —  and  that  is, 
none  at  all. 

Whoever  has  the  mountain-moving  faith  to  imagine 
that  these  three  *' transcendental  world-enigmas"  are 
solved  by  Professor  HaeckeFs  ipse  dixit,  will  find 
nothing  to  baulk  at  in  the  subsequent  explanation  of 
the  "  origin  of  consciousness  and  self-consciousness." 
This,  indeed,  is  but  a  redupHcation  of  the  thesis  that 
life  "growed."  With  a  stroke  of  his  magic  wand,  Pro- 
fessor Haeckel  transforms  the  brain  of  the  ape  into 
the  human  brain,  and  then  (as  we  have  seen  above) 
points  out  in  the  latter  the  organs  which  produce  con- 
sciousness. Here,  then,  are  four  of  our  seven  world- 
riddles  compendiously  settled  out  of  hand;  and  who, 
after  this,  will  bother  about  such  trifles  as  the  ap- 
parently pre-ordained  order  of  nature,  the  genesis  of 
rational  thought  and  speech,  and  the  freedom  of  the 
will  ?  Indeed,  we  learned  at  the  outset  that  the  so- 
called  problem  of  the  freedom  of  the  will  has  no  right 


HAECKEL'S  NEW  CALVINISM     107 

to  a  place  in  the  list  of  the  "Weltratsel,"  being,  in 
fact,  nothing  but  a  pure  dogma  based  on  an  illusion. 
But  even  here  we  are  not  left  without  a  supplement- 
ary reassurance,  furnished  out  of  Professor  Haeckel's 
unbounded  intimacy  with  all  the  secrets  of  existence. 
He  tells  us  (as  usual,  without  condescending  to  argu- 
ment) that 

The  great  struggle  between  the  determinist  and  the 
indeterminist,  between  the  opponent  and  the  sustainer 
of  the  freedom  of  the  will,  has  ended  to-day,  after  more 
than  two  thousand  years,  completely  in  favour  of  the 
determinist.  The  human  will  has  no  more  freedom  than 
that  of  the  higher  animals,  from  which  it  differs  only  in 
degree,  not  in  kind.  .  ,  ,We  now  know  that  each  act  of 
the  will  is  as  fatally  determined  by  the  organization  of 
the  individual  and  as  dependent  on  the  momentary  con- 
dition of  his  environment  as  every  other  psychic  ac- 
tivity. The  character  of  the  inclination  was  determined 
long  ago  by  heredity  from  parents  and  ancestors;  the 
determination  to  each  particular  act  is  an  instance  of 
adaptation  to  the  circumstances  of  the  moment,  wherein 
the  strongest  motive  prevails,  according  to  the  laws 
which  govern  the  statics  of  emotion.^ 

I  have  risked  overloading  my  pages  with  quotations 
in  order  to  make  convincingly  apparent  the  amazing 
levity  with  which  Professor  Haeckel  substitutes  af- 
firmation for  proof.  But  I  would  advise  my  reader  also 
to  read  the  whole  of  his  book.  He  will  find  thereby  that 
the  samples  I  have  chosen  are  strictly  representative. 

*  Riddles,  chap,  vn,  p.  47,  English  translation,  sth  edition. 


io8  CRITICISMS  OF  LIFE 

Our  philosopher,  without  hesitation  or  misgiving,  con- 
tinually offers,  as  proved,  statements  which  are  as 
improved  and  unprovable  as  those  of  the  Athanasian 
Creed  or  the  Westminster  Confession.  He  also  talks  in 
romantic  fashion  about  the  world  "obeying"  the  laws 
which  he  and  his  scientific  predecessors  have  formu- 
lated. His  much- trumpeted  "law  of  substance"  is  not 
what  ordinary  thinkers  imderstand  a  law  to  be  —  a  gen- 
eralization of  the  observed  uniformities  of  experience; 
it  is  something  imposed  on  the  universe  from  without, 
and  "obeyed"  by  "the  innumerable  bodies  which  are 
scattered  about  the  space-filling  ether."  ^  For  him,  it 
is  no  figure  of  speech  that  the  cosmos  and  its  constit- 
uent parts  are  "by  eternal  laws  oi]  iron  ruled."  He 
is  quite  convinced  that  a  natural  law  is  itself  a  force 
or  cause;  and  he  does  not  escape  from  this  ludicrous 
fallacy  even  when  talking  about  an  empirical  law 
which  he  himself  has  formulated.  One  of  his  most 
useful  contributions  to  the  study  of  hmnan  race-history 
is  the  hypothesis  that  the  development  of  the  indi- 
vidual is  a  brief  and  rapid  recapitulation  of  the  entire 
evolution  of  the  species.  This  statement,  verified  by 
many  correspondences  between  embryonic  develop- 
ment and  the  paleontological  record  of  the  history  of 
the  animal  world,  he  calls  the  "biogenetic  law."  It 
means,  to  use  his  own  words,  that  "ontogeny  is  a  brief 
and  condensed  recapitulation  of  phylogeny."  One 
would  have  expected  Professor  Haeckel  to  remember 
*  Riddles,  chap,  i,  p.  s,  English  translation,  5th  edition. 


HAECKEL'S  NEW  CALVINISM     109 

that  such  a  law  —  even  if  universally  verified,  which 
it  is  not  —  would  be  merely  a  statement  of  the  fact 
that  certain  phenomena  happen.  Yet  over  and  over 
again,  in  his  "Anthropogenic,"  he  makes  this  fact  the 
cause  of  itself,  and  talks  of  things  happening  "in 
virtue  of  the  biogenetic  law."  At  the  close  of  this 
book  he  writes:  — 

There  remains  only  the  .  .  .  monistic  conception, 
according  to  which  the  human  soul  is,  like  any  other 
animal  soul,  a  function  of  the  central  nervous  system, 
and  develops  in  inseparable  connection  therewith.  We 
see  this  onto  genetically  in  every  child.  The  biogenetic 
law  compels  us  to  affirm  it  phylo genetically} 

But  how  can  his  own  home-made  law  "compel"  him 
to  affirm  anything  of  the  sort  apart  from  experience, 
seeing  that  his  law  is  only  a  generalization  of  his  ex- 
perience ?  Unless  the  thesis  that  the  soul  is  a  function 
of  the  nervous  system  (whatever  that  may  mean)  can 
be  proved  without  invoking  his  biogenetic  principle 
—  or,  conversely,  if  the  facts  are  inferred  from  the 
principle  and  not  the  principle  from  the  facts  —  his 
"law"  has  no  claim  to  be  so  called,  even  in  the  strictly 
limited  scientific  meaning  of  the  term. 

The  bundle  of  world-riddles  which  Professor  Haeckel 
solves  by  denying  their  existence,  are  not  necessarily, 
in  all  cases,  inherently  insoluble.  A  truly  scientific 
and  philosophical  procedure  may,  at  all  events,  in 

*  Evolution  of  Man  (English  translation  of  Anthropogenie),  popular 
edition,  1906,  p.  355. 


no  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

future  throw  much  more  light  upon  them  than  we 
have  to-day.  It  is,  for  example,  not  inconceivable  that 
we  may  one  day  be  able  to  define  conditions  under 
which  a  non-biogenetic  appearance  of  life  would  take 
place.  It  is  not  entirely  unthinkable  that  we  may 
some  day  learn  whether  the  physical  imiverse  did  or 
did  not  have  a  beginning  in  time,  and  whether,  if  so, 
its  parts  were  originally  in  motion  or  not.  We  cannot 
be  Pyrrhonists;  but  it  is  incumbent  upon  us  to  see 
that  we  really  know  what  we  think  we  know,  and  not 
to  deceive  ourselves,  or  be  deceived  by  others,  into 
imagining  that  we  know  a  host  of  things  about  which 
we  really  know  nothing. 

Now,  what  Professor  Haeckel  offers  us  as  proved  is 
a  series  of  affirmations,  which  must  either  be  based 
on  a  supernatural  revelation,  vouchsafed  exclusively  to 
himself,  or  else  mere  speculations  on  the  secrets  of  the 
imiverse.  Who  told  him  that  the  universe  is  eternal, 
infinite  and  illimitable?  What  does  he  know  (h3^o- 
theses  apart)  of  an  "infinite  space,"  whether  distinct 
or  not  from  the  "substance'^  which  fills  it?  What 
basis  has  he  for  his  doctrine  of  abiogenesis,  except 
the  fact  that  his  a  priori  dogmas  make  him  wish  to 
find  it  true  ?  And  in  regard  to  the  freedom  of  the  will, 
how  does  he  know  that  every  act  of  will  is  fatally 
determined?  If  he  had  ever  read  Bergson's  ''Time 
and  Free  Will"  ^  he  would  have  seen  that  the  great 

*  This  book,  under  its  French  title  (Essai  sur  les  Donn6es  immidi- 
ates  de  la  Conscience),  was  published  many  years  before  The  Riddles  of 


HAECKEL'S   NEW   CALVINISM     iii 

struggle  between  the  opponent  and  the  sustainer  of 
the  freedom  of  the  will  is  by  no  means  settled  in  favour 
of  the  former.  He  woidd  have  learned,  on  the  contrary, 
that  it  is  still  possible  for  a  philosopher  of  high  scien- 
tific competence  to  dispute  the  very  presuppositions  of 
the  mechanical-determinist  argimient.  What  Bergson 
questions  (and  in  my  opinion  rightly)  is  whether  the 
spatial  categories  of  quantity,  number  and  magnitude 
can  legitimately  be  applied  to  any  states  of  conscious- 
ness—  even  to  sensations.  No  doubt  the  mind  too 
has  its  uniformities;  but,  though  these  be  determinate, 
they  nevertheless  manifest  a  determinism  sui  generis, 
whose  sequences  are  not,  and  never  will  be,  measur- 
able and  predictable  by  the  same  standards  and  in- 
struments as  those  of  physical  nature. 

Let  us  now  return  to  the  enlightening  and  inspiring 
conclusion  as  to  the  nature  and  potentialities  of  man 
which  Haeckel  deduces  from  his  body  of  dogmas  about 
the  universe  in  general.  We  have  seen  that  he  makes 
mind  the  product  and  effect  of  matter.  Without  its 
material  substratum  it  cannot  exist,  and  our  philoso- 
pher accordingly  denies  dogmatically  the  immortality 
of  the  soul.^  Body,  therefore,  is  the  only  reality,  and 

the  Universe  was  written.  But  evidently  Haeckel  has  never  heard  of 
Bergson.  This  perhaps  is  the  less  to  be  wondered  at,  seeing  that  a 
recent  disciple  of  Haeckel,  Mr.  Hugh  S.  R.  Elliot,  has  written  a  vol- 
ume on  Modern  Science  and  the  Illusions  of  Professor  Bergson,  without 
having  ever  read  Time  and  Free  Will. 

*  "These  inquiries,  which  might  be  supplemented  by  many  other 
results  of  modem  science,  prove  the  old  dogma  of  the  immortality  of 
the  soul  to  be  absolutely  untenable."  (English  translation,  5th  edi- 
tion, p.  73.)    It  is  needless  to  add  that  in  the  whole  of  Haeckel's 


112  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

man  is  but  a  momentary  phenomenon  in  the  eternal 
flux  of  things,  impotent  and  transient  as  foam-flakes 
on  the  waves.  We  have  quoted  above  (p.  88)  Haeckel's 
conclusion  that  humanity,  being  but  a  special  and 
temporary  form  of  matter  and  force,  has  "no  more 
value  for  the  universe  at  large  than  the  ant,  the  fly 
of  a  summer's  day,"  and  all  the  rest  of  it. 

But  what,  in  such  a  philosophy,  can  possibly  be  the 
meaning  of  the  phrase,  "value  for  the  universe  at 
large"?  This  wonderful  philosopher,  having  got  rid 
of  the  idea  of  any  purpose  in  the  world,  now  falls  back 
upon  language  which  can  only  mean  that,  after  all, 
there  is  a  purpose  in  things.  How  can  anything  what- 
ever be  of  "value"  to  such  a  universe  as  he  has  evolved 
from  the  abysses  of  his  imagination  ?  No  words  could 
express  the  depths  of  Professor  HaeckeFs  contempt 
for  any  theologian  who  should  talk  about  value  to 
the  universe  —  thereby  implying  that  the  imiverse  as 
a  whole  has  ends  and  purposes  in  view.  The  truth  is 
that  the  category  of  value  has  meaning  and  use  for 
man  alone.  The  question  is  not  so  much  what  we  are 
worth  to  the  universe,  but  what  the  universe  is  worth 
to  us. 

It  is  needless,  at  this  stage,  to  add  that  the  central 
problem  of  philosophy,  which  is  that  of  the  relation 

eleventh  chapter,  entitled  "The  Immortality  of  the  Soul,"  nothing 
whatever  is  adduced  to  "prove"  this  comprehensive  negative.  Apart 
from  the  preliminary  assumption  that  the  soul  is  something  which 
the  body  secretes,  the  physiological  and  other  facts  which  he  sets  forth 
give  no  support  to  his  conclusion. 


HAECKEL'S  NEW  CALVINISM     113 

of  thought  to  its  object,  has  not  only  not  been  solved, 
but  has  never  even  been  perceived  by  Professor 
Haeckel.  He  speaks  of  "the  absurd  idealism"  of 
Berkeley's  thesis  that  the  essence  of  bodies  is  in  their 
perception.  Rushing  in,  as  usual,  where  angels  might 
fear  to  tread,  he  serenely  lays  it  down  that  the  thesis 
should  be  corrected  to  read  as  follows :  — 

Bodies  are  only  ideas  for  my  personal  consciousness; 
their  existence  is  just  as  real  as  that  of  my  organs  of 
thought,  the  ganglionic  cells  in  the  grey  bed  of  my  brain, 
which  receive  the  impress  of  bodies  on  my  sense-or- 
gans, and  form  those  ideas  by  association  of  the  impres- 
sions. ^ 

It  has  never  occurred  to  him  that  these  wonderful 
"organs  of  thought"  are  themselves  only  ideas  — 
only  items  in  consciousness.  Yet  the  epiphenomenon 
which,  according  to  Haeckel,  they  produce,  is  the  only 
reality  he  or  anybody  else  knows  immediately  and 
unquestionably.  In  the  same  confident  fashion,  he 
dismisses  Kant's  thesis  of  the  transcendental  ideality 
of  time  and  space,  by  saying  that  this  applies  only  to 
the  subjective  side  of  the  problem,  and  demanding 
that  we  should  recognize  the  equal  validity  of  the 
objective  side.  And  by  "objective"  he  does  not  mean 
what  another  philosopher  would  mean  —  namely, 
that  these  transcendentally  ideal  forms  of  perception 
are  valid  not  only  for  the  individual  but  for  conscious- 

1  Riddles,  chap,  xiii,  p.  87,  English  translation,  5th  edition.  Note 
the  repetition  of  the  unintelligible  dogma  that  the  cells  of  the  brain 
"  form  ideas." 


114  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

ness  in  general.  No;  what  he  means  is  that  they  exist 
independently  of  any  consciousness;  that,  like  the  ma- 
terial world  of  his  imagination,  they  are  prior  to  and 
altogether  independent  of  mind.  And  he  even  goes  on 
to  say,  in  a  transport  of  sublime  absurdity,  that  "the 
reality  of  time  and  space  is  now  fully  established  by 
that  expansion  of  our  philosophy  which  we  owe  to 
the  law  of  substance,  and  to  our  monistic  cosmogony." 
That  is  to  say,  his  evolutionary  mythology  succeeds 
in  proving  the  fundamental  forms  of  rationality,  which 
are  presupposed  in  every  single  step  by  which  the 
mind  advances  to  its  formulation!  It  is  a  pity  he  has 
never  read  the  metaphysical  portions  of  Green's  "Pro- 
legomena to  Ethics."  His  comments  on  that  book 
would  have  been  as  funny  as  his  remarks  on  Kant  and 
Berkeley. 

But  it  is  wearisome  to  heap  up  the  refutation  of  a 
creed  so  manifestly  baseless.  As  Paulsen  said,  it  is 
infallibility  which  speaks  to  us  in  Haeckel's  pages; 
and  only  those  who  are  willing  to  accept  a  new  Pope 
at  his  own  valuation  will  be  imposed  upon  by  one  who 
seeks  to  hide  beneath  a  cloud  of  new  and  ugly  words 
the  beggarly  poverty  of  his  thought.  Our  interest  in 
him  and  his  pronouncements  arises  merely  from  the 
fact  that  over  a  million  human  beings  have  purchased 
his  work,  and  thousands  of  them,  in  every  modern  na- 
tion, actually  mistake  him  for  a  scientific  philosopher, 
a  revealer  of  new  truths,  as  well  as  the  destroyer  of  a 
number  of  superstitions. 


HAECKEL'S  NEW   CALVINISM     115 

Now,  what  are  likely  to  be  the  moral  effects  of  this 
new  Calvinism  of  HaeckeFs,  in  which  original  sin  is 
rebaptized  heredity  and  predestination  labelled  deter- 
minism, and  which  has  no  occasion  for  a  hell  after 
death  only  because  it  has  provided  such  an  efficient 
substitute  in  this  life,  in  the  shape  of  man*s  utter  impo- 
tence, and  the  illusoriness  of  his  spiritual  aspirations  ? 

One  need  not  anticipate  that  the  diffusion  of  this 
new  brand  of  materialism  is  likely  to  bring  about  any 
widespread  moral  deterioration;  and  this  for  two  rea- 
sons. The  first  is  that,  as  we  have  noted  before,  it  is 
no  new  thing  for  the  Western  world  to  be  materiaUstic; 
its  Christianity  has  always  been  so.  The  second  reason 
is  that,  as  Fichte  said,  a  man's  character  is  not  so 
much  determined  by  his  philosophy  as  is  his  philosophy 
by  his  character.^  In  other  words,  it  is  because  we 
have  always  been  trained  to  consider  the  world  of  the 
senses  as  more  real  than  the  world  of  the  spirit,  and 
because  even  our  religion  has  lost  sight  of  spiritual 
reaUties  through  its  obsession  by  the  bodily  symbols 
which  it  has  substituted  for  them,  that  our  age  is  so 
completely  predisposed  to  fall  a  prey  to  teachers  of 
Haeckel's  calibre.  His  mechanical  determinism  is  truly 
a  doctrine  of  despair;  yet  it  is  no  more  so  than  the 
predestinationism  of  St.  Augustine  and  Calvin.  Both 
views  reduce  man's  personality  to  a  shadow,  a  mere 

^  "Was  fiir  eine  Philosophic  man  wahle,  hangt  da  von  ab,  was  fiir 
ein  Mensch  man  ist.  Denn  die  Philosophic  ist  kein  toter  Hausrat,  den 
man  an-  imd  ablegen  konnte,  sondern  sic  ist  beseelt  dutch  die  Seele 
des  Menschen,  der  sie  hat." 


ii6  CRITICISMS   OF   LIFE 

pale  reflection  of  outward  things,  having  no  force  in 
itself,  and  lost  in  illusion  when  it  dreams  of  resisting 
its  environment. 

What  is  needed  in  the  modern  world  is  that  we 
should  make  a  clean  sweep  of  both  types  of  fatalism 
—  the  theological  and  the  pseudo-scientific  alike.  If 
Fichte  be  right,  a  philosophic  reform  cannot  precede, 
but  must  advance  step  for  step  with,  a  moral  and 
spiritual  reawakening.  We  may  thus  return  to  the 
sense  that  Plato  had,  that  ideas  and  ideals  are  real 
with  a  primary  reality  —  more  real  than  the  sun  and 
the  stars  and  the  many-coloured  panorama  of  the  out- 
ward world.  Only  this  truth  can  justify  our  intuitive 
revulsion  from  the  money-worship  and  the  luxury- 
worship  which,  in  our  time  more  than  ever  before,  are 
eating  into  the  souls  of  nations.  America  to-day  is 
palsied  by  the  moral  scepticism  which  expresses  itself 
in  the  conviction  that  every  man  has  his  cash  price, 
and  is  a  fool  if  he  does  not  make  it  a  high  one.  Such 
a  standard  of  values  turns  life  into  dust  and  ashes. 
In  every  case  of  national  ruin  which  history  has  pre- 
served to  us,  it  was  this  practical  materialism  and 
ethical  scepticism  which  ultimately  caused  the  col- 
lapse, by  producing  the  conditions  which  made  it 
inevitable.  If  present-day  civilization  dies,  it  will  die 
of  these  idolatries,  to  which  Professor  Haeckel's  sham 
philosophy  is  the  appropriate  theoretical  counterpart. 
We  must  go  back  to  the  ancient  sense  that  the  true 
values  of  life  lie  in  goods  which  cannot  even  be  formu- 


HAECKEUS  NEW   CALVINISM     117 

lated  in  materialistic  terms:  in  fraternity  and  justice, 
in  honour  and  magnanimity,  in 

Truth  and  life-Hghtening  Duty, 
Love  without  crown  or  sword, 
That  by  his  might  and  godhead  makes  man  god  and  lord. 

To  many  minds  to-day  the  sense  of  uncertainty,  the 
attitude  of  suspended  judgment  towards  the  problems 
of  the  world,  is  so  intensely  painful  that  any  sort  of  a 
ready-made  answer  to  the  souFs  questions  is  preferable 
to  it.  This  it  is  which  accounts  for  the  survival  of 
orthodox  theology,  as  well  as  for  the  popularity  of 
Haeckel's  new  Calvinism,  both  of  which,  to  quote  the 
words  of  Mr.  F.  H.  Bradley,  "vanish  like  ghosts  before 
the  breath  of  free  sceptical  inquiry."  But  the  pain 
which  people  feel,  in  the  presence  of  a  mystery  ac- 
knowledged to  be  such,  is  due  to  inadequate  reflection 
on  the  implications  of  man's  moral  nature,  and  to  the 
false  training  of  fifteen  hundred  years  of  ecclesiastical 
dogmatism,  with  its  insistence  that  a  complete  account 
of  the  origin  and  destiny  of  the  universe  and  of  the 
human  soul  is  a  necessary  pre-condition  of  righteous- 
ness. I  will  not  repeat  what  in  the  preceding  chapter 
I  have  said  of  mysticism  and  of  its  opposition  to  the 
certitude  of  orthodoxy.  Suffice  it  to  say  that  the  truly 
inspiring  as  well  as  the  truly  wise  attitude  towards  life 
is  neither  that  of  the  old  nor  the  new  dogmatist,  to 
whom  nothing  is  unknown,  and  for  whom  life  can  con- 
ceal no  surprises.  It  is  rather  that  of  the  old  adventur- 
ers, who  set  sail  in  their  feeble  boats  across  the  un- 


ii8  CRITICISMS     OF  LIFE 

charted  seas,  not  knowing  whether  even  the  sequences 
of  nature  to  which  they  were  accustomed  might  not 
be  replaced  by  others  in  the  unknown  lands  towards 
which  they  journeyed.  It  is  this  sense  of  the  unex- 
hausted possibilities  of  life  which  we  regain  through  a 
sceptical  re-examination,  resulting  in  rejection,  of  the 
materialistic  fairy-tales  of  the  priests  of  theology  and 
of  physical  science.  There  is  a  zest  and  a  charm  in  the 
challenging  unknown  which  no  mechanistic  or  finalistic 
theory  can  ever  impart.  It  lies  in  the  sense  that  we  in 
part  create  the  future  into  which  we  are  ever  press- 
ing. We  therefore  can  stand  towards  it  in  the  temper 
of  the  old  mariners,  whose  adventurous  exultation  is 
so  wonderfully  conveyed  in  the  lines  of  Coleridge:  — 

The  fair  breeze  blew,  the  white  foam  flew, 

The  furrow  followed  free; 
We  were  the  first  that  ever  burst 

Into  that  silent  sea. 

What  may  be  the  end  of  humanity^s  quest  for 
self-realization  we  neither  know  nor  care  to  know. 
Whether,  apart  from  us,  the  world  is  animated  by  a 
purpose,  whether  mind  can  exist  apart  from  body  or 
body  apart  from  mind,  whether  this  mortal  shall  put 
on  immortality — all  these  are  idle  questions;  ques- 
tions that  the  mystic  never  cares  to  put.  His  joy  in 
life  and  action  is  self-justif)dng.  He  is  contemptuous 
of  the  answers  of  materialism  to  the  enigmas  of  the 
world,  and  equally  contemptuous  of  those  of  orthodox 
theology.  He  resents  their  irrelevance,  as  well  as  their 


HAECKEL'S  NEW   CALVINISM     119 

intellectual  futility.  For  him,  the  very  charm  of  life 
lies  in  its  inscrutability.  He  loves  too  much  the 
presence  of  the  eternal  Questioner  to  desire  its  de- 
thronement. He  is  inspired  and  impelled  to  highest 
achievement  not  only  by  the  invincible  certainties  of 
immediate  ethical  experience,  but  also  by  the  sense  of 

The  sweet  strange  mystery 

Of  what  beyond  these  things  may  lie, 

And  yet  remains  unseen. 

NOTE 

The  English  translations  of  the  two  most  popular  of 
Haeckel's  works,  "The  Riddles  of  the  Universe  "  and  *'  The 
Evolution  of  Man,"  are  issued  by  the  Rationalist  Press 
Association  in  London,  of  which  the  present  writer  is  a 
member.  This  circumstance  may  seem  to  the  reader  of 
the  foregoing  chapter  to  call  for  some  explanation.  My  re- 
ply to  the  criticism  which  I  anticipate  is  that  in  my  at- 
tack upon  Haeckel  I  have  been,  as  I  trust  I  am  throughout 
this  book,  rigidly  loyal  both  to  the  letter  and  to  the  spirit 
of  Rationalism,  as  officially  defined  by  the  Association  in 
the  following  words:  "The  mental  attitude  which  unre- 
servedly accepts  the  supremacy  of  reason,  and  aims  at 
establishing  a  system  of  philosophy  and  ethics  verifiable 
by  experience  and  independent  of  all  arbitrary  assump- 
tions or  authority." 

Thus  Rationalists  are  ipso  facto  freethinkers.  The 
Association  is,  of  course,  not  responsible  for  everything 
written  by  the  authors  whose  works  it  publishes.  It  has 
erred,  in  my  judgment,  by  printing  and  circulating  the 
writings  of  Professor  Haeckel,  whose  so-called  system  of 
philosophy  is  not  verifiable  by  experience,  is  a  mass  of 


I20  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

arbitrary  assumptions,  and  is  accepted  by  most  of  his 
devotees  merely  on  the  authority  of  its  author.  But  for 
this  error  the  Association  has  splendidly  compensated  by 
the  admirable  selection  of  works  of  real  thinkers  which 
it  has  issued  to  the  public  at  the  cheapest  possible  rates. 
By  bringing  out  the  works  of  such  writers  as  Lecky,  Hux- 
ley, Darwin,  Hume,  Matthew  Arnold,  John  Stuart  Mill, 
and  many  others,  at  twelve  cents  a  volume,  it  has  ren- 
dered an  enormous  service  to  popular  thought  and  culture 
— a  service  which  it  is  devoutly  to  be  wished  that  some 
public-spirited  body  would  undertake  in  the  United  States. 


CHAPTER  IV 

SIR  OLIVER  LODGE  AND  THE  EVIDENCE  FOR 
IMMORTALITY 

The  annual  Presidential  Address  to  the  British  Asso- 
ciation for  the  Advancement  of  Science  is  one  of  the 
institutions  of  England,  an  institution  which  has  al- 
ready gathered  around  it  a  distinguished  tradition. 
Everybody  has  read  or  heard  of  the  address  of  Pro- 
fessor Tyndall  at  Belfast  in  1878,  in  which  he  made  for 
science  the  tremendous  claim  that  it  would  wrest  from 
theology  the  whole  field  of  human  knowledge.  The 
tradition  thus  set,  marking  as  it  did  an  epoch  in  that 
** warfare  between  science  and  theology"  for  which 
the  nineteenth  century  is  memorable,  has  been  well 
sustained  by  the  majority  of  the  addresses  from  the 
Association's  presidential  chair  which  have  followed. 
It  is  interesting  to  compare  the  discourse  on  "  Con- 
tinuity"  delivered  in  191 3  by  Sir  Oliver  Lodge  with  the 
utterance  in  the  previous  year  of  Sir  Ernest  Schaefer. 
The  latter  is  a  biologist  of  the  extreme  materialistic 
type,  and  the  burden  of  his  discourse  was  that  all  Ufe, 
including  the  highest  mental  processes  of  mankind,  is 
reducible  to  the  interaction  of  atoms  of  matter,  accord- 
ing to  unvarjdng  chemical  laws.  He  closed  his  ad- 
dress by  affirming  that  death  is  purely  and  simply  a 


122  CRITICISMS  OF  LIFE 

physiological  process,  and  by  expressing  a  weird  sort 
of  hope  that  the  recognition  of  this  fact  will  reconcile 
man  to  dissolution  more  than  any  other  thought  has 
been  able  to  do. 

The  selection  of  Sir  Oliver  Lodge  to  succeed  Sir 
Ernest  Schaefer  looks  suspiciously  like  a  conspiracy. 
For  many  years  Sir  Oliver  has  been  almost  as  notorious 
as  a  devotee  of  psychical  research  as  he  has  been  justly 
famous  as  a  physicist.  He  has  repeatedly,  in  book  after 
book  and  in  speech  after  speech,  declared  himself  a 
believer  in  human  immortality.  One  cannot  say,  of 
course,  that  the  choice  of  him  under  these  special  cir- 
cumstances was  a  conscious  conspiracy;  but  there  is 
suflScient  evidence  of  purpose  in  the  matter  to  justify 
an  argument  for  design  on  the  part  of  any  belated  sur- 
vivor of  the  school  of  Paley. 

One  welcomes,  to  begin  with.  Sir  Oliver  Lodge's 
deniuiciation  of  the  dogmatism  of  the  materialistic 
school.  Direct  controversy  in  a  Presidential  Address 
to  the  British  Association  is  naturally  excluded  by  the 
traditions  of  good  form  associated  with  the  post,  but 
Sir  Oliver  Lodge  gets  as  near  to  it  as  it  is  possible  for  a 
man  to  do,  without  actually  mentioning  names.  His 
whole  discourse,  more  especially  in  its  closing  para- 
graphs, is  a  direct  refutation  of  the  position  taken  by 
his  predecessor,  and  of  the  popular  materialism  asso- 
ciated in  the  public  mind  with  the  writings  of  Professor 
Ernst  Haeckel.  Several  years  ago  Sir  Oliver  Lodge 
wrote  a  book  called  "Life  and  Matter,"  which  was  a 


EVIDENCE  FOR   IMMORTALITY     123 

critical  examination  of  HaeckePs  "Riddles  of  the  Uni- 
verse/* and  in  his  Presidential  Address  he  repeats,  in 
summary  form,  the  conclusions  there  advanced. 

In  so  far  as  Sir  Oliver  Lodge  rebukes  the  confident 
dogmatic  denials  of  the  materialistic  biologists,  I  am 
heartily  at  one  with  him;  but  unfortunately  he  himself 
seems  to  fall  into  a  counter-dogmatism  which  goes  as 
far  beyond  evidence  and  experience  as  the  materialistic 
position  falls  short  of  them.  "Science,"  he  says,  "can- 
not make  comprehensive  denials."  "It  is  always  ex- 
tremely difficult  to  deny  anything  of  a  general  charac- 
ter, since  evidence  in  its  favour  may  be  only  hidden 
and  not  forthcoming."  He  ought  to  recognize,  how- 
ever, that,  from  the  scientific  point  of  view,  it  is  quite 
as  illegitimate  to  make  comprehensive  assertions  in  the 
absence  of  sufficient  verified  evidence. 

It  may  be  convenient  to  outline  one's  own  position 
with  regard  to  the  belief  in  immortality  before  dis- 
cussing that  of  Sir  OHver  Lodge.  For  myself,  when 
the  question  is  put  to  me,  "If  a  man  die,  shall  he  live 
again  ?  "  I  am  constrained  to  answer  that,  for  all  we 
know,  it  is  perfectly  possible.  Nothing  that  I  have  met 
with  in  the  literature  of  biology  or  any  other  science 
seems  to  give  the  slightest  weight  to  the  confident  and 
dogmatic  denials  of  human  immortality  which  one 
finds  in  the  writings  of  men  like  Haeckel.  I  say  this  in 
full  consciousness  of  the  strength  of  the  case  set  up  in 
191 2  by  Sir  Ernest  Schaefer.  Nay,  I  am  willing  to  go 
beyond  the  evidence  which  the  materialistic  school  is 


124  CRITICISMS   OF   LIFE 

at  present  in  a  position  to  adduce.  Let  us  assume  that 
biology  will  at  last  succeed  in  proving  its  contention 
that  life  arose  originally  from  non-living  matter.  Let 
the  familiar  dictum  of  Harvey,  *^Omne  vivum  ex 
vivo,"  be  completely  disproved.  Let  the  actual  pro- 
cess by  which  the  first  organisms  were  engendered  by 
natural  development  from  inorganic  matter  be  repro- 
duced in  the  laboratory.  Then  let  it  further  be  demon- 
strated that  every  possible  activity  of  the  human  mind 
at  its  highest  level  is  coincident  with  and  correlative 
to  some  definitely  assignable  physical  change.  It  still 
will  not  be  proved,  or  provable,  that  mental  and 
psychic  activity  are  impossible  apart  from  the  func- 
tioning of  that  special  material  instrument  which  we 
call  the  human  body. 

For  the  weakness  of  the  materialistic  case  is  that 
it  ignores  throughout  the  only  vital  consideration.  It 
denies  the  reality  of  that  one  fact  which  we  know 
directly  and  at  first  hand.  It  reduces  consciousness  to 
an  illusion,  or,  to  use  its  ponderous  term,  an  epiphe- 
nomenon.  Consciousness  is  for  this  school  an  acci- 
dental by-product  of  physical  functioning,  hard  to  ac- 
count for,  but  not  to  be  permitted  to  disturb  in  the 
least  our  physical  calculations  and  conclusions. 

Now,  the  imanswerable  argument,  as  it  seems  to  me, 
which  one  must  address  to  the  materialists  is  that  it 
is  this  epiphenomenon,  this  intractable  fraction,  this 
residual  by-product  of  the  processes  that  science  de- 
scribes, which  is  our  one  and  only  guarantee  for  the 


EVIDENCE  FOR   IMMORTALITY     124 

validity  of  all  our  other  knowledge.  Our  very  belief  in 
the  existence  of  our  own  bodies,  and  in  the  external 
world  of  which  they  are  a  part,  is  dependent  upon,  and 
presupposes,  complete  confidence  in  the  validity  of  the 
testimony  of  consciousness.  If  mind  be  unreal,  or  real 
with  only  a  secondary  degree  of  reality,  then  the  outer 
world  in  which  we  believe  on  the  testimony  of  mind  is 
reduced  to  the  level  of  hallucination.  If  we  cannot 
trust  our  only  direct  experience,  our  own  conscious- 
ness, then  we  are  compelled  to  distrust  the  very  argu- 
ment by  which  materialistic  science  seeks  to  invalidate 
our  belief  in  the  reality  of  consciousness.  For  that 
argument  presupposes  the  thing  it  seeks  to  disprove. 
This  is  what  Schopenhauer  meant  when  he  declared 
that  it  was  "the  absurd  imdertaking  of  materialism  to 
derive  the  subject  from  the  object." 

We  find  ourselves  in  a  world  of  sights  and  sounds,  of 
touch,  taste  and  smell.  Yet  all  these  sensations,  and 
the  regularities  of  co-existence  and  sequence  to  which 
they  testify,  are  in  fact  presented  to  us  only  as  modifi- 
cations of  our  consciousness.  Constrained  as  we  are  to 
believe  in  some  sort  in  the  reality  of  this  world  of  sense- 
impressions,  we  are  ipso  facto  constrained  to  ascribe  a 
prior  and  deeper  reality  to  our  own  percipient  selfhood. 
This  is  the  indubitable  fact  which  has  led  philosophers 
like  Berkeley  to  declare  that  the  existence  of  the 
physical  universe  consists  wholly  in  the  fact  that  it 
is  perceived  or  perceivable. 

The  materialist  who  is  able  and  willing  to  follow  this 


126  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

argument  will,  of  course,  be  ready  with  his  reply.  Your 
contention,  he  will  say,  is  all  very  well,  but  you  cannot 
deny  that  the  body,  the  brain  and  the  nervous  system 
are  absolutely  necessary  to  consciousness.  I  answer 
that,  so  far  as  experience  goes,  we  have  no  right  to  say 
more  than  that  this  physical  substratum  is  necessary 
to  the  manifestation  of  consciousness  to  other  conscious 
agents  similarly  conditioned.  We  meet  with  no  dis- 
closure of  the  existence  of  consciousness,  no  evidence  of 
the  presence  or  activity  of  mind,  except  in  conjunction 
with  a  material  body.  We  are,  therefore,  entitled  to 
say  that,  so  far  as  experience  goes,  mind  and  body  are 
two  aspects  of  a  unity.  But  this  does  not  justify  us  in 
saying  that  consciousness  cannot  exist  independently 
of  the  special  physical  machinery  with  which  alone  we 
find  it  associated;  and  a  fortiori  we  cannot  deny  that  it 
might  manifest  itself  in  activities  conditioned  by  other 
machinery  than  that  with  which  we  are  at  present 
acquainted. 

The  argument  used  by  Professor  James,  in  his 
IngersoU  Lecture  on  "Human  Immortality,''  is  thus 
far  unanswered  and  seems  unanswerable  from  the 
materialistic  standpoint.  The  brain,  says  the  material- 
ist, is  the  organ  of  mind.  For  every  act  of  conscious- 
ness there  is  presumably,  and  in  some  cases  assignably, 
a  corresponding  physiological  modification.  Agreed, 
says  Professor  James;  we  accept  the  position  that  the 
brain  is  the  organ  of  mind.  But  such  a  statement  is 
susceptible  of  at  least  two  interpretations.  The  organ 


EVIDENCE   FOR   IMMORTALITY     127 

may  either  produce  that  of  which  it  is  the  instrument, 
or  its  function  may  be  limited  to  that  of  transmission. 
In  our  experience,  for  example,  electricity  is  associated 
with  things  like  batteries,  dynamos  and  wires.  The 
wire  is  the  organ  of  the  electric  current.  Without  the 
wire  (the  argument,  of  course,  was  formulated  before 
the  days  of  wireless,  but  ethereal  vibrations  will  an- 
swer its  purpose  just  as  well)  there  could  be  no  mani- 
festation of  electricity.  But  nobody  supposes  that  the 
wire  produces  that  of  which  it  is  the  organ,  or  that  the 
electricity  ceases  to  exist  when  the  wire  is  disconnected 
or  destroyed.  It  ceases,  indeed,  to  manifest  itself  to  us; 
but  we  know  that  this  absence  of  manifestation  is  not 
identical  with  non-existence.  And  so,  for  all  we  know, 
it  may  be  with  mind.  Its  manifestation  to  us  is  depend- 
ent upon  the  efficient  fimctioning  of  those  particular 
items  in  consciousness  which  we  call  the  brain  and 
nervous  system.  But  nothing  in  our  experience,  scien- 
tific or  otherwise,  entitles  us  to  say  that  it  could  not  exist 
apart  from  its  organ,  or  that  it  might  not,  under  other 
conditions  and  to  other  conscious  agents,  be  mani- 
fested through  an  organ  of  different  nature.  Nor  is  it 
yet  by  any  means  demonstrated  that  the  connection 
between  brain  and  mind  is  of  the  nature  of  a  complete 
parallelism.  The  ingenious  hypothesis  of  M.  Bergson, 
that  the  brain  acts  only  as  a  screen,  to  exclude  from 
consciousness  the  vast  mass  of  psychic  elements  that 
are  always  pressing  against  it  and  admit  only  those 
that  are  serviceable  at  the  moment,  seems  at  least  no 


128  CRITICISMS  OF  LIFE 

less  consistent  with  the  ascertained  facts  than  the 
psycho-physical  paralleKsm  of  Fechner  and  Paulsen.^ 

One  must  therefore  dismiss  the  materialistic  denial 
of  immortality  as  a  piece  of  dogmatism,  which  is  as 
improvable  as  any  of  the  theological  dogmas  which 
the  materialistic  school  rejects.  It  is  an  expression  of 
philosophic  incompetence,  and,  in  general,  of  a  per- 
sonal predilection  in  favour  of  the  negative  conclusion. 
Sir  Oliver  Lodge  makes  admirably  the  point  that  we 
have  to  guard  against  personal  predilection  in  the 
negative  direction  as  well  as  in  the  affirmative.  We  all 
know  how  theological  polemics  have  been  vitiated  by 
the  fact  that  the  controversialist's  conclusion  visibly 
comes  before  his  premises.  His  process  of  reasoning 
is  introduced  only  to  justify  a  foregone  conclusion; 
his  predilection  is  the  parent  of  his  argument.  This 
psychological  tendency  has  to  be  borne  in  mind  when 
^e  are  dealing  with  the  arguments  of  those  who  deny 
theological  positions,  as  well  as  of  those  who  affirm 
them. 

But  the  greatest  error  of  Sir  Oliver  Lodge  seems  to 
consist  in  the  fact  that  he  confuses  the  abstractly 
possible  with  the  actual.  He  has  overlooked  a  principle 
of  reasoning  formulated  nearly  two  himdred  years 
ago  by  that  keenest  of  theologians,  Bishop  Butler.   In 

1  Bergson's  doctrine,  set  forth  in  his  Matter  and  Memory,  and 
in  his  discourse  on  Dreams,  seems  more  consistent  than  any  other 
extant  hypothesis  with  the  facts  of  dream-life  and  of  abnormal  psy- 
chology as  recently  set  forth  by  Freud.  See  the  latter's  Interpreta- 
tion of  Dreams  and  Psychopathology  of  Everyday  Life.  (English 
translations  by  Brill,  published  by  Macmillan  &  Co.) 


EVIDENCE  FOR   IMMORTALITY     129 

Butler's  "Analogy  of  Religion"  we  find  it  laid  down, 
with  that  clear  precision  which  marks  the  born  thinker, 
that  "Suppositions  are  not  to  be  looked  on  as  true, 
because  not  incredible."  This  is  what  Sir  Oliver  Lodge 
forgets.  He  stands  as  the  advocate,  I  will  not  say  of 
a  new  superstition,  but  at  all  events  of  a  new  Aber- 
glauhe  —  a  belief  that  exceeds  any  available  evidence. 
He  is  as  unwarrantably  confident  in  his  affirmations 
as  the  materialist  in  his  denials.  "The  facts,"  he  says, 
"have  convinced  me  that  memory  and  affection  are 
not  limited  to  that  association  with  matter  by  which 
alone  they  can  manifest  themselves  here  and  now,  and 
that  personality  persists  beyond  bodily  death."  My 
contention  is  that  Sir  Oliver  Lodge  is  not  entitled, 
logically  or  scientifically,  even  to  this  attitude  of  per- 
sonal conviction.  The  true  position,  in  view  of  our 
present  knowledge,  is  one  of  suspended  judgment.  The 
finest  result  of  a  scientific  training  is  the  production  of 
that  rigorous  standard  of  accuracy,  which  enables  a 
man  to  know  at  once  when  he  does  not  know,  and  pre- 
vents him  from  allowing  any  predilection  to  force  him 
a  single  inch  in  the  direction  of  unwarranted  assertion. 
It  is  not  inconceivable,  for  example,  that  in  a  year 
from  now  I  may  inherit  or  acquire  a  fortune  of  a  mil- 
lion dollars.  Anybody  who  affimied  this  to  be  impos- 
sible would  thereby  write  himself  down  a  pedantic 
dogmatist.  But  I  in  my  turn  should  be  extremely 
foolish  if  I  were  to  treat  this  bare  possibility  as  a 
certainty  or  even  a  probability.  The  path  of  prudence 


I30  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

for  me  is  to  assume  that  a  year  hence  I  shall  be  as 
dependent  for  my  livelihood  on  my  exertions  as  I  am 
to-day.  And  so  it  is  with  the  question  of  a  life  after 
death.  To  rush  from  the  bare  abstract  possibility  to 
a  belief  in  the  actuality  of  such  a  future  is  both 
logically  and  morally  unjustifiable. 

Let  us  examine  one  of  many  instances  of  the  way  in 
which  Sir  Oliver  Lodge  makes  this  illicit  leap.  In  his 
book  entitled  "The  Substance  of  Faith  Allied  with 
Science/'  which  is  drawn  up  in  the  form  of  a  cate- 
chism, we  find  on  page  20  the  following  Question  and 
Answer:  — 

Question :  Are  there  any  beings  higher  in  the  scale  of  exist- 
ence than  man? 

Answer :  Man  is  the  highest  of  the  dwellers  on  the  planet 
Earth,  but  the  Earth  is  only  one  of  many  planets 
warmed  by  the  sun,  and  the  sun  is  only  one  of  a 
myriad  of  similar  suns,  which  are  so  far  off  that 
we  barely  see  them  and  group  them  indiscrim- 
inately as  stars.  We  may  reasonably  conjecture 
that  in  some  of  the  innumerable  worlds  circling 
round  those  distant  suns  there  must  be  beings  far 
higher  in  the  scale  of  existence  than  ourselves; 
indeed,  we  have  no  knowledge  which  enables  us 
to  assert  the  absence  of  intelligence  anywhere.* 

The  jump  from  "conjecture"  to  "must"  illustrates 

vividly  the  process  by  which  Sir  Oliver  Lodge  has 

arrived  at  his  belief  in  man's  survival  of  death.  If  it  is 

a  matter  of  conjecture  whether  other  worlds  than  ours 

*  Italics  mine. 


EVIDENCE  FOR   IMMORTALITY     131 

are  inhabited  by  intelligent  beings,  we  obviously  have 
no  right  to  say  that  such  beings  "must"  exist.  If  the 
evidence  forces  us  to  use  the  word  "must,"  then  the 
word  "conjecture"  is  grotesquely  inapplicable.  Sir 
Oliver  Lodge's  habit  of  thought  seems  invariably  to 
be  that  if  we  have  no  knowledge  which  enables  us 
to  affirm  the  absence  of  intelligence,  we  are  entitled  to 
affirm  its  presence.  Logic  demands,  however,  the 
admission  that  we  have  no  knowledge  which  enables 
us  to  assert  the  presence  of  intelligence  anywhere  save 
on  earth.  This  was  fully  admitted,  and  indeed  con- 
tended, by  a  thinker  as  eminent  in  science  as  Sir  Oliver 
Lodge,  and,  as  it  happens,  not  less  eminent  also  as  a 
spiritist:  the  late  Alfred  Russel  Wallace.  The  thesis 
of  his  recent  book  on  "Man's  Place  in  the  Universe" 
is  that  the  earth  alone,  of  all  the  worlds  observable 
by  us,  is  fitted  to  be  the  abode  of  intelligent  organ- 
isms. Man  as  a  rational  creature,  he  maintains,  stands 
solitary  in  the  universe.  The  basis  of  his  argument  is 
that  only  on  the  earth  does  there  exist  the  unique  as- 
semblage of  circumstances  necessary  for  the  existence 
of  living  and  intelligent  beings.  That  combination  of 
the  temperature  necessary  to  life  with  a  breathable 
atmosphere  and  an  adequate  supply  of  fresh  water, 
does  not  exist  in  any  other  star  or  planet  discernible 
through  the  instruments  of  astronomy.  It  well  may 
be  that  Dr.  Wallace  went  too  far  in  his  inferences 
from  the  evidence  on  this  point.  It  is  the  kind  of  rea- 
soning which  made  some  of  the  ancients  pronounce 


132  CRITICISMS   OF   LIFE 

the  existence  of  antipodes  impossible,  and  made 
Locke's  Indian  prince  scout  the  idea  that  water  in 
England  became  solid  in  winter.  I  am  concerned  only 
to  show  that  Sir  Oliver  Lodge's  belief  in  intelligences 
higher  than  man  is  indeed  a  bare  conjecture,  which 
he  is  not  entitled  to  speak  of  as  a  belief  necessitated 
by  evidence. 

Let  us  turn  now  to  a  brief  consideration  of  the 
alleged  facts  which  have  convinced  this  distinguished 
man  of  science  that  death  is  only  an  incident  in  the 
continuous  life  of  man.  The  reader  is  presumably 
familiar  with  the  kind  of  evidence  collected  by  the 
Society  for  Psychical  Research  and  published  in  its 
''Transactions/'  as  well  as  in  books  like  Sir  Oliver 
Lodge's  ''Survival  of  Man,"  Myers's  "Human  Per- 
sonality," the  book  called  "Phantasms  of  the  Living," 
and  in  spiritualistic  literature  generally.  In  Sir  Oliver 
Lodge's  book  we  find  that  much  of  the  evidence  ad- 
duced, even  if  it  were  validated  in  detail,  would  give 
no  support  to  faith  in  survival.  The  greater  part  of  his 
volume  consists  of  evidence  for  telepathy  and  for  auto- 
matic writing.  If  telepathy  were  proved,  it  would  only 
demonstrate  that  the  living  human  mind,  associated 
with  a  body,  possesses  powers  transcending  those 
hitherto  allowed  for  in  our  philosophy.  If  a  message 
can  be  conveyed  from  Jones's  mind  to  Brown's,  apart 
from  the  channels  of  communication  hitherto  recog- 
nized, that  only  proves  that  Jones,  "whilst  this  machine 
is  to  him,"  is  able  to  exercise  a  wider  activity  than  we 


EVIDENCE   FOR   IMMORTALITY     133 

had  supposed.  It  does  not  in  the  least  demonstrate 
that  his  mind  will  survive  his  body.  Indeed,  the  most 
scientific  of  the  experimenters  have  maintained  that 
there  is  a  physical  medium  of  communication,  consist- 
ing of  ethereal  vibrations  set  going  by  brain  activity, 
in  all  cases  of  telepathy.  If  this  be  so,  then  such  com- 
munication is  proved  to  be  as  truly  dependent  on  the 
brain  as  speech  is. 

In  the  same  way,  the  process  of  automatic  writing  is 
evidence  only  of  hitherto  unsuspected  sub-conscious 
powers  in  the  writer.  The  script  may  indeed  purport 
to  contain  messages  from  other  minds,  but  we  are 
clearly  not  entitled  scientifically  to  postulate  the 
presence  of  any  mentality  other  than  that  of  the  writer. 
The  cases  of  secondary  and  tertiary  personality,  famil- 
iar to  abnormal  psychology,  show  how  unsuspectedly 
wide  is  the  range  of  possible  mental  activity;  and  the 
complete  forgetfulness  which  the  patient  in  one  stage 
shows  of  his  conscious  activities  m  another  proves  how 
possible  it  is  for  the  automatic  writer  to  give,  in  perfect 
good  faith,  what  purport  to  be  messages  from  the  dead, 
while  they  are  in  fact  only  the  outcroppings  of.  strata 
of  his  own  personality  which  usually  He  below  the 
threshold  of  consciousness. 

The  case  is  the  same  with  the  argument  from  appari- 
tions. We  are  offered  a  multitude  of  instances  in  which 
the  dying  have  appeared,  apparently  in  physical  form, 
to  friends  at  a  distance.  Let  us  set  aside  all  question 
of  the  accuracy  of  the  records  and  of  the  subjectivity 


134  CRITICISMS  OF  LIFE 

of  the  visions,  and  assume,  for  the  purpose  of  our 
argument,  that  the  stories  are  in  all  cases  true.  What 
follows  ?  No  argument  whatever  for  survival;  only  the 
fact  that  one  living  human  being  can,  under  unusual 
circumstances,  perceive  a  phantasm  of  another  equally 
living  human  being.  It  is  not  asserted  that  the  phan- 
tasms are  those  of  persons  already  dead;  they  are  only 
those  of  persons  about  to  die.  Their  message  is^ 
Morituri  salutamus.  It  is  perfectly  conceivable  that 
the  imminence  of  death  may  be  the  specific  condition 
for  the  occurrence  of  such  experiences;  but  we  are  not 
entitled  on  the  basis  of  such  evidence  to  conclude  that 
the  dying  person  survives  his  physical  dissolution. 

The  greatest  stronghold,  however,  of  the  belief  in 
survival  is  the  multitudinous  testimony  of  the  seance- 
room.  But  this  again  is  vitiated  for  scientific  purposes 
by  the  fact  that  we  do  not  know  the  limits  either  of  the 
mind  or  body  of  the  living  human  being.  Even  physi- 
cally, we  are  ignorant  of  the  nether  limit,  so  to  speak, 
of  our  potentialities.  Doctors  assure  us  that  the  undis- 
coverable  causes  of  many  diseases  are  in  all  probability 
ultra-microscopic,  —  the  effects,  that  is,  of  organisms 
which  are  too  small  to  be  made  visible,  and  which  give 
no  traceable  reaction  to  the  most  delicate  tests  which 
science  has  thus  far  been  able  to  devise.  If  this  be  true 
of  the  body,  how  much  more  true  is  it  of  our  mental 
and  psychic  activities. 

Let  us  apply  this  criterion  to  the  mass  of  mediumis- 
tic  communications,  slate-writings  and  alleged  letters 


EVIDENCE  FOR  IMMORTALITY     135 

from  the  spirit  world,  which  for  many  people  consti- 
tute the  basis  of  belief  in  personal  survival.  Here 
again  we  will  set  aside  all  question  of  fraud,  and  leave 
out  of  consideration  the  very  important  problem  as  to 
the  competence  of  the  investigators.  Mr.  Sludge,  we 
know,  has  had  hosts  of  imitators,  but  we  will  forget 
them  for  the  moment.  Assuming  both  perfect  good 
faith  in  the  medium  and  scientific  competence  in  the 
witnesses,  what  is  the  value  of  the  evidence  adduced  ? 
The  answer  is  that  the  only  thing  clearly  testified  to 
is  an  unaccustomed  and  unclassifiable  activity  on  the 
part  of  the  medium  himself.  Suppose  he  speaks  with 
another  voice  and  discloses  so  novel  a  context  of 
knowledge  and  experience  as  to  seem  a  wholly  different 
person  from  his  normal  self.  There  is  still  no  proof 
of  the  presence  of  an  independent  individuality.  The 
verification  offered  for  these  communications  is  gen- 
erally the  statement  that  somebody  present  knows  the 
facts  involved.  The  medium  is  ostensibly  controlled, 
let  us  say,  by  the  spirit  of  Mr.  Gladstone.  He  talks  in 
Gladstone's  person  and  discloses,  we  will  assume,  facts 
which  occurred  in  Gladstone's  experience  but  not  in 
that  of  the  medium  in  his  primary  personality.  Such 
facts  can  only  be  verified  if  some  one  or  more  of  the 
observers  are  acquainted  with  them.  But  in  this  case 
why  should  not  the  source  of  the  medium's  knowledge 
be  precisely  the  consciousness  or  sub-consciousness  of 
the  observer  who  knows  the  facts?  If  telepathy  be 
a  reality,  how  do  we  know  that  the  medium  is  not 


136  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

unconsciously  tapping  the  mind  of  the  observer  and 
constructing  his  narrative  from  hints  so  obtained  ? 

It  may  be  urged  that  telepathy  is  not  a  demonstrated 
fact;  but  "secondary  personality"  is  demonstrated; 
and  science  and  logic  constrain  us  to  consider  both  as 
possible  explanations  before  resorting  to  the  unneces- 
sary multiplication  of  entities  involved  in  the  spiritistic 
hypothesis. 

Most  of  us,  I  suppose,  are  familiar  with  that  queer 
experience  of  reminiscence,  which  consists  in  finding 
oneself  in  a  company  where  one  has  never  been  before, 
and  yet  having  a  sudden,  convincing  premonition  of 
what  is  next  to  be  said  or  done.  This  experience  is  a 
common  one.  Dickens,  among  others,  testifies  to  it ;  and 
it  has  more  than  once  happened  to  myself.  Conversing 
with  friends  or  strangers,  sitting  on  a  committee,  or 
conducting  a  discussion  on  one  of  my  own  lectures,  it 
has  many  times  been  my  fate  to  feel  an  intuitive  cer- 
tainty as  to  what  would  be  said  next;  and,  so  far  as  I 
can  recall,  I  have  never  been  mistaken  in  my  anticipa- 
tion. The  "daimon"  seems  to  know  his  business.  How 
is  this  to  be  explained?  We  do  not  know;  but  the 
simplest  h3^othesis  seems  to  be  that  of  an  unclassified 
activity  of  mind  which  effects  a  communication  more 
rapid  than  that  of  the  normal  channels,  and  therefore 
anticipates  the  slower  action  of  the  organs  of  speech. 
Such  an  hypothesis  would  accoimt  for  a  vast  percentage 
of  the  alleged  facts  from  which  spiritists  infer  the 
presence  of  discarnate  intelligence. 


EVIDENCE  FOR   IMMORTALITY     137 

And  now,  conceding  for  the  sake  of  argument  that 
man's  survival  could  be  proved,  there  are  three  criti- 
cisms to  be  passed,  which  seem  almost  invariably  to 
be  overlooked  by  believers  like  Sir  Oliver  Lodge. 

The  first  of  these  is  that  the  proof  of  survival  is  a 
totally  different  thing  from  the  proof  of  immortality. 
Sir  Oliver  Lodge  is  always  talking  of  immortality,  and 
that  in  a  fashion  which  leads  us  to  suppose  that  he 
considers  it  sjoionymous  with  survival.  This  is  another 
of  the  illicit  leaps  in  logic  which  seem  to  prove  that, 
for  him  too,  the  conclusion  antedates  the  premises.  If 
the  argument  from  analogy  is  good  for  anything,  it 
would  lead  us  to  suppose  that  a  life  after  death  will  be 
transient,  like  our  bodily  life  on  earth.  The  most  con- 
vinced spiritualist  of  them  all  is  forced  to  concede  that 
one  of  the  conditions  of  that  after-life  is  the  attainment 
of  a  new  instrument,  material  or  "ethereal,"  analogous 
to,  though  possibly  finer  and  more  delicate  than,  the 
human  body.  If  this  be  so,  how  can  we  suppose  that 
such  an  instnmient  is  not  subject  to  a  slow  attrition 
akin  to  that  which  in  time  wear^  out  our  present 
vehicle  of  spiritual  communication?  Since,  then,  life 
here  is  temporary,  an  after-life  may  be  no  less  so;  and 
a  proof  of  survival  would  leave  us  as  far  off  as  ever  from 
a  proof  of  immortality. 

A  second  unwarrantable  assumption  made  by  many 
believers  in  an  after-life  is  that  the  establishment  of 
such  a  life  would  be  a  verification  of  the  dogmas  of 
orthodox  Christianity.  Here,  however,  we  need  to  be 


138  CRITICISMS  OF  LIFE 

reminded  of  another  of  the  utterances  of  the  great 
theologian  whom  I  have  already  quoted.  ^'A  proof/' 
says  Bishop  Butler,  "even  a  demonstrative  one,  of  a 
future  life  would  not  be  a  proof  of  religion."  (By  reli- 
gion, of  course,  he  means  orthodox  Christian  theology.) 
"For,  that  we  are  to  live  hereafter  is  just  as  reconcil- 
able with  the  scheme  of  atheism,  and  as  well  to  be  ac- 
counted for  by  it,  as  that  we  are  now  alive  is."  In 
other  words,  if  a  naturalistic  philosophy  can  account 
for  our  existence  here  and  now,  without  the  hypothesis 
of  a  superhuman  personal  God,  or  of  miraculous  inter- 
vention in  the  economy  of  nature,  the  same  philosophy 
could  equally  well  account  for  mental  and  psychical 
existence  in  conditions  totally  different  from  those  of 
our  present  life.  The  apologist  of  theology,  therefore, 
must  not  think  that  the  seance-room  is  ever  going  to 
furnish  a  buttress  for  its  assumptions. 

The  third  criticism  which  one  must  make,  upon  such 
an  after-life  as  would  be  in  store  for  men  if  we  were 
compelled  to  believe  in  Sir  Oliver  Lodge's  evidence,  is 
perhaps  the  most  important  of  all.  Sir  Oliver  and  his 
co-believers  invariably  assume  that  the  after-life  must 
be  a  far  finer,  grander  and  nobler  state  of  being  than 
our  present  existence.  They  speak  of  it  with  an  enthusi- 
asm akin  to  that  displayed  by  believers  in  Christian 
orthodoxy  in  their  pictures  of  heaven.  But  if  we  ask 
the  grounds  for  this  assumption,  we  find  that  there  are 
none.  We  have  here  the  proof  that  the  so-called  scien- 
tific believers  in  immortality  are  in  reality  not  scientific 


EVIDENCE  FOR   IMMORTALITY     139 

at  all.  They  believe  in  an  a  priori  theory,  and  they 
overlook  the  contradictions  to  that  theory  which  lie 
on  the  face  of  the  very  evidence  which  they  themselves 
adduce.  For  if  we  are  to  believe  in  the  messages  that 
come  from  that  other  world,  we  shall  be  forced  to  con- 
clude that  the  himaan  spirit  after  death  undergoes  a 
most  startling  and  disheartening  deterioration  in  qual- 
ity and  capacity.  I  have  read  masses  of  these  alleged 
communications,  purporting  to  emanate  from  the 
greatest  minds  that  have  illuminated  the  pathway  of 
history,  and  they  seem  (to  put  it  mildly)  more  like  the 
babblings  of  imbecility  than  the  utterances  of  genius. 
Among  these  messages  have  been  letters  from  F.  W. 
H.  Myers,  one  of  the  finest  writers,  as  well  as  one  of  the 
noblest  souls,  of  the  nineteenth  century.  Being  vouch- 
safed in  America,  these  utterances  and  epistles  have 
been  full  of  Americanisms  —  surely  a  startling  devel- 
opment in  Myers's  use  of  the  English  language.  They 
have  also  been  full  of  errors  of  grammar  for  which  a 
sixth-form  schoolboy  would  incur  merited  chastise- 
ment. And,  for  the  rest,  they  have  been  a  tissue  of  ban- 
alities which  might  have  emanated  from  any  one  of  a 
thousand  hopelessly  commonplace  people,  but  which 
never  could  have  been  uttered  by  a  profound  thinker 
and  a  fine  scholar  like  Mr.  Myers.  The  same  is  true 
of  the  alleged  messages  from  a  hundred  great  minds. 
In  a  collection  of  such  documents,  published  in  London 
in  191 2  by  Admiral  Moore,^  we  find  communications 

'  ^  Glimpses  of  the  Next  State:  the  Education  of  an  Agnostic.  By  Vice- 
Admiral  W.  Usborne  Moore.    (London:  Watts  &  Co.,  1912.) 


I40  CRITICISMS   OF   LIFE 

supposed  to  come  from  Galileo  and  Sir  Isaac  Newton. 
One  of  these  affirms  the  existence  of  a  planet  in  the 
solar  system  beyond  the  orbit  of  Neptune;  the  other 
denies  it.  Imagine  the  two  greatest  modern  astrono- 
mers, untrammelled  by  earthly  limitations  and  en- 
riched with  the  experience  of  centuries,  contradicting 
one  another  on  so  elementary  a  question  of  fact!  Yet 
this  is  typical  of  the  character  of  these  messages  from 
the  other  world.  No  hint  of  any  new  discovery,  no 
glimmer  of  any  addition  to  our  hard  -  won  human 
knowledge,  has  ever  emanated  from  beyond  the  veil. 
If  we  were  to  believe  in  mediumistic  messages,  we 
should  be  forced  to  conclude  that  himian  originality  is 
a  myth,  that  almost  every  thought,  every  invention, 
every  discovery  that  men  have  made  has  been  com- 
municated to  them  by  the  discarnate  minds  of  those 
who  have  gone  before.  But  such  a  thought  is  as  base- 
less as  it  is  revolting.  Some  of  Admiral  Moore's  "con- 
trols" informed  him  that  the  discoveries  of  Mr.  Edison 
were  due  to  suggestions  from  disembodied  spirits.  This 
assertion  calls  to  mind  the  photograph  in  the  recently 
published  "Life  of  Edison,"  which  depicts  him  as  he 
appeared  after  working  five  days  and  nights  on  end 
on  the  phonograph.  After  such  herculean  labour,  after 
such  intense  and  marvellous  concentration  upon  his 
task,  we  are  to  be  told  that  the  man  himself  deserves 
no  credit  for  his  invention  —  that  it  has  been  given 
to  him  by  suggestion  from  incorporeal  minds ! 
Why,  if  such  things  are  possible,  do  we  never  get  any 


EVIDENCE  FOR   IMMORTALITY     141 

intimation  of  impending  disaster  from  these  ubiquitous 
spirits  ?  It  happened  while  Admiral  Moore's  book  was 
passing  through  the  press  that  his  little  grandchild  was 
burned  alive  in  its  cot,  through  the  negligence  of  a 
nurse.  A  week  or  more  afterwards  the  spirits  turned 
up  in  the  seance-room  to  assure  the  bereaved  relative 
that  the  little  one  was  happy  and  well  cared  for  in  the 
other  world.  But,  needless  to  say,  no  hint  had  come  to 
him  before,  warning  him  to  prevent  this  distressing 
catastrophe.  Such  is  the  invariable  course  of  things  in 
these  messages  from  beyond.  They  are,  without  ex- 
ception, fatuous  and  useless.  They  consist  of  matter 
which  not  even  a  spiritist  would  think  worth  the 
cost  of  ink  and  paper  if  they  were  believed  to  come 
from  living  human  minds;  but  because  of  the  weird 
interest  attaching  to  manifestations  believed  to  be 
occult,  they  are  trumpeted  as  revelations  and  made  the 
basis  for  a  vast  mountain  of  inference  which  is  totally 
devoid  of  scientific  warrant. 

Of  course,  the  robust  faith  of  the  spiritist  pro- 
vides him  with  an  answer  to  this  criticism.  The  mind 
and  body  of  the  medium,  he  tells  us,  furnish  only 
a  very  imsatisfactory  and  refractory  instrument  for 
these  communications.  The  medium  is  only  "a  tele- 
graph-ofiice " ;  and  our  experience  of  that  marvellous 
agency,  the  Western  Union  Telegraph  Company, 
warns  u^  to  expect  something  more  than  ordinary 
human  fallibility  in  the  operations  of  such  a  machin- 
ery. In  the  lecture  on  "The  Immortality  of  the  Soul" 


142  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

which  Sir  Oliver  Lodge  has  reprinted  in  his  book 
called  "Man  and  the  Universe/'  he  says:  *'It  must  be 
admitted  that  in  all  cases,  the  manner  and  accidents  or 
accessories  of  the  messages  are  liable  to  be  modified  by 
the  material  instrument  or  organ  through  which  the 
thought  or  idea  is  for  our  information  reproduced." 
It  must  indeed  be  admitted !  And  on  the  same  princi- 
ple we  must  admit  that  messages  may  be  created  by  the 
sub -conscious  mind  whose  operations  are  correlative 
to  the  medium's  brain  and  body. 

It  is  perhaps  unnecessary  to  point  out  the  difference 
between  such  an  after-life  as  spiritism  and  ordinary 
orthodox  teaching  aJ05rm  and  the  conception  of  eter- 
nity which  their  philosophy  implies.  No  picture  of  the 
Christian  heaven  has  ever  been  able  to  escape  the 
infection  of  temporality  and  spatiality.  Even  Keble, 
the  most  orthodox  of  poets,  is  forced  to  declare  that 
the  common  ideas  of  heaven  are  "poor  fragments  all 
of  this  low  earth."  Neither  spiritualism  nor  popular 
theology  has  been  able  to  grasp  or  willing  to  accept 
the  implications  of  eternity  as  distinguished  from  pro- 
tracted temporality.  Milton,  declaiming  in  his  splen- 
did rhetoric  about  "the  dateless  and  irrevoluble  circle 
of  eternity,"  speaks  in  the  same  breath  of  progression. 
But  progression  is  exactly  what  the  concept  of  eter- 
nity excludes.  Eternity  stands  opposed  to  time,  as 
perfection  to  imperfection,  without  before  and  after, 
embracing  in  a  timeless  moment  past,  present  and 


EVIDENCE  FOR   IMMORTALITY     143 

future.  The  "eternal  glance"  of  which  the  German 
philosophers  speak  is  a  necessary  implication  of  their 
thought,  inconceivable  as  it  may  be  to  minds  limited  as 
ours  are.  To  believe,  then,  in  an  after-life  tranmielled 
by  time  and  space,  is  not  to  escape  from  materialism 
or  to  attain  to  the  standpoint  of  eternity. 

There  is  one  lesson  forced  upon  us  by  Sir  Oliver 
Lodge's  advocacy  of  the  survival  of  man  which  it  is 
very  important  for  the  world  to  learn.  We  see  already 
around  us  signs  of  a  revolt  against  the  expert.  The 
revolt  is  a  healthy  one.  Its  necessity  is  probably  not 
the  fault  of  the  expert  as  such,  but  it  does  arise  from 
the  altogether  excessive  deference  which  the  public 
has  been  accustomed  to  give  to  his  authority.  What 
we  are  learning  now  is  that  one  must  beware  of  the 
expert  outside  his  province.  Sir  Oliver  Lodge  is  un- 
doubtedly one  of  the  greatest  of  living  physicists;  and 
any  utterance  which  he  may  make  within  the  sphere  of 
his  special  competence  commands  the  respectful  atten- 
tion of  the  layman.  But  anybody  who  compares  those 
parts  of  his  Presidential  Address  in  which  he  discusses 
physics,  with  the  paragraphs  in  which  he  talks  about 
human  survival,  can  see  that  he  has  an  enormously 
more  rigorous  standard  of  accuracy  in  his  own  sphere 
than  in  this  other  region,  in  which  he  is  only  an  adven- 
turous amateur.  His  belief  in  immortality  is  based  on 
evidence  that  he  would  not  look  at  in  a  physics  labor- 
atory; and,  apart  from  the  quality  of  the  evidence,  he 
draws  from  it  conclusions  far  outrunning  the  infer- 


144  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

ences  that  would  be  justified  if  the  evidence  were 
sound.  We  must  learn,  then,  that  the  very  eminence 
of  a  man  in  his  own  sphere  is  a  reason  for  suspecting 
his  deliverances  on  things  outside  it.  That  very  con- 
centration of  attention,  through  many  years,  which 
enables  him  to  speak  with  authority  in  one  branch  of 
science,  inevitably  excludes  such  specialized  prepara- 
tion and  continuous  concentration  in  another  field  as 
would  entitle  him  to  authority  there.  The  expert, 
then,  in  physics  or  biology,  is  no  more  to  be  trusted 
than  a  well  -  equipped  la5nnan  when  he  speaks  on 
problems  of  psychology. 

It  is  worthy  of  note  in  this  connection  that  the 
specialists  in  mental  science  are  seldom  or  never  con- 
verted to  Sir  Oliver  Lodge's  belief.  Men  whose  special 
training  and  lifelong  discipline  have  lain  in  the  field 
of  psychology  are  not  prepared,  upon  the  evidence,  to 
believe  in  human  survival.  Such  men  as  Professor 
Leuba,  Professor  Morris  Jastrow,  and  even  William 
James,  fall  far  short  of  the  dogmatism  of  Sir  Oliver 
Lodge,  Sir  William  Crookes,  the  late  W.  T.  Stead 
and  our  other  distinguished  amateurs  of  the  seance- 
room.  The  inclusion  of  Professor  James's  name  in  this 
category  of  the  sceptical  may  come  as  a  surprise  to 
those  unacquainted  with  his  fijial  utterances  on  the 
subject.  Yet  in  his  posthumous  volume  of  ^'Memories 
and  Studies"  he  quite  definitely  declared  that  after 
twenty  years  of  psychical  research  he  was  still  "on  the 
fence"  as  regards  the  question  whether  man  survives 


EVIDENCE  FOR  IMMORTALITY     145 

bodily  death.  Sir  Oliver  Lodge  ought  to  be  in  the  same 
position;  and  his  presence  in  the  camp  of  the  convinced 
believers  is  evidence  that,  with  him  as  with  the  rest 
of  them,  the  wish  is  father  to  the  thought. 

Despite  all  this  criticism,  however,  I  would  reiterate 
that  my  own  position  involves  no  denial  either  of  sur- 
vival or  even  of  immortality.  My  standpoint  is  that 
of  complete  agnosticism.  Inamortality  for  me  is  no 
more  proved  than  it  is  disproved.  I  protest  against 
the  investigation  of  this  subtle  and  difficult  question 
by  persons  like  Admiral  Moore,  whose  incompetence 
is  grotesquely  apparent,  and  who  are  animated  by 
a  motive  which  would  vitiate  all  results,  even  if  the 
students  were  relatively  competent.  The  ideal  way 
to  handle  the  problem  would  be  to  entrust  it  to  a 
fairly  large  commission,  composed  of  men  wholly  de- 
void of  predilection,  and  thoroughly  trained  in  the 
finest  and  most  exact  methods  of  observation  which 
modern  psychology  has  elaborated.  To  them  should  be 
handed  over  the  Eusapia  Palladinos,  the  Mrs.  Pipers 
and  the  rest  of  the  wonderful  people  capable  of  func- 
tioning as  vehicles  for  minds  other  than  their  own 
conscious  ones.  It  should  be  the  business  of  the  com- 
missioners to  eliminate  such  evidence  as  contains 
signs  of  fraud  or  of  unconscious  dissimulation,  and  to 
sift  the  tenuous  residue  in  the  most  searching  manner, 
so  that  they  could  present  to  the  public  v.  hatever 
fragments  of  indisputable  inference  might  be  extract- 
ible  from  the  data.  If  such  a  commission  were  to  work 


146  CRITICISMS  OF  LIFE 

continuously  and  to  report,  let  us  say,  at  ten-  or 
twenty-year  intervals,  it  is  possible  that  in  a  century 
we  might  obtain  sufficient  evidence  to  justify  a  definite 
affirmative  opinion.  Until  such  searching  and  com- 
petent investigation  has  been  completed,  we  have  no 
right  to  decide;  or,  if  we  do  decide,  we  must  admit 
that  our  position  is  due  not  to  evidence  but  to  a  priori 
faith  or  unfaith. 

The  loss  of  belief  in  immortaHty  can  make  no  differ- 
ence to  the  moral  outlook  of  humanity.  One's  only 
interest  in  the  subject  from  an  ethical  point  of  view  is 
to  show  that  morality  is  richer  and  purer  when  the 
thought  of  an  after-life  has  been  eliminated  than  when 
that  thought  is  brought  in  as  an  incentive.  The  uni- 
verse has  no  terrors  for  the  man  who  has  overcome  the 
fear  of  death.  But  there  is  obviously  something  de- 
fective in  the  righteousness  which  needs  the  stimulus 
of  the  hope  of  immortality,  or  the  spur  of  the  fear  of 
punishment  after  death.  To  buttress  morality  with 
such  hopes  and  fears  is  to  degrade  it.  We  may  con- 
fidently trust  that  if  the  vision  of  a  life  hereafter  fades 
more  and  more  from  the  minds  of  men  there  will  be 
a  more  general  readiness  to  do  justice,  to  love  mercy, 
and  to  walk  humbly  before  the  ideal  which  we  worship, 
than  has  ever  been  induced  by  the  machinery  of 
unwarrantable  hope  and  fear  resorted  to  by  religion  in 
the  past. 


CHAPTER  V 

MR.   WINSTON  CHURCHILL  AND  CLERICAL 

There  could  be  no  completer  misunderstanding  of  the 
age  in  which  we  live  than  that  opinion  which  regards  it 
as  indifferent  to  religion.  To  many  of  the  traditional 
forms  of  religion  and  to  the  organizations  which  stand 
for  these  it  is  indeed  indifferent;  but  this  attitude  is 
wholly  distinct  from  apathy  in  regard  to  the  funda- 
mental problems  of  which  our  traditional  theologies 
assume  to  offer  the  solution.  Indeed,  the  very  refusal 
of  many  men  and  women  to  accept  orthodox  answers 
to  the  soul's  questions  arises  from  a  profounder  intel- 
lectual honesty,  a  deeper  sincerity  —  in  other  words,  a 
more  truly  religious  spirit  —  than  has  ever  prevailed 
before. 

If  evidence  be  needed  of  the  intense  yearning,  the 
inarticulate  desire  of  the  present  age  for  a  new  canali- 
zation of  the  spirit  of  religion,  it  lies  ready  to  hand  in 
every  public  library.  The  output  of  books  dealing  with 
the  questions  of  God  and  the  soul,  of  conversion,  of 
conduct  and  character  here  and  of  a  life  hereafter,  is 
altogether  unprecedented.  We  may  quite  safely  follow 
in  this  case  the  economic  principle  which  connects 
supply  with  demand.  Books  to-day  are  published  for 
profit;  and  the  presence  in  the  market  of  innumerable 


148  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

works  on  religion  is  demonstrative  evidence  of  the 
existence  of  a  widespread  public  interest  in  the  sub- 
ject. Every  new  message  has  an  enthusiastic  hearing; 
and  a  hearing,  moreover,  which  is  not  evidence  of  a 
mere  Athenian  curiosity,  but  one  backed  by  substan- 
tial monetary  support.  The  world  is  really  on  tiptoe  of 
creative  expectancy,  awaiting  and  demanding  a  new 
religion  which  shall  satisfy  the  old  need  for  inward 
harmony  and  reconciliation  with  the  order  of  things. 
Another  clue  to  the  mind  of  an  age,  which  we  may 
safely  trust,  is  furnished  by  its  fiction.  The  themes 
which  novelists  choose  are  always  those  in  which  they 
have  reason  to  expect  a  considerable  measure  of  public 
interest,  and  even  in  their  most  incredible  characters 
the  lineaments  of  their  times  are  inevitably  reflected 
or  refracted.  Now  if  we  compare  the  fiction  of  to-day 
with  that  of  a  hundred  or  even  fifty  years  ago,  we  find 
that  the  religious  motif  has  in  contemporary  novels  a 
prominence  altogether  new.  The  clerics  and  the  reli- 
gious-minded la5mien  in  our  older  fiction  are  beset  by 
no  theological  difficulties  and  by  no  discomforting  sense 
of  a  clash  between  the  ethical  standards  of  their  faith 
and  the  established  social  order.  Parson  Thwackum 
in  '^Tom  Jones  "is  typical  of  his  era.  *' When  I  men- 
tion religion,"  he  says,  "I  mean  the  Christian  religion; 
and  not  only  the  Christian  religion,  but  the  Protes- 
tant religion;  and  not  only  the  Protestant  religion, 
but  the  Church  of  England."  He  is  troubled  by  no 
misgiving  as  to  the  permanent  power  of  the  religion 


CLERICAL   "HERESY"  149 

of  the  Church  of  England  to  satisfy  all  the  needs  of 
the  human  spirit,  nor  are  there  in  his  circle  any  au- 
ditors to  embarrass  him  with  perplexing  questions. 
The  case  is  the  same  in  the  great  fiction  of  the  nine- 
teenth century.  When  Dickens  introduces  a  clergy- 
man, he  is  of  the  type  of  the  Reverend  Frank  Milvey  in 
"Our  Mutual  Friend,"  whose  only  serious  problem  in 
life  is  that  of  making  a  wholly  inadequate  salary  meet 
the  needs  of  a  more  than  adequate  family.  For  the 
rest,  we  find  in  Dickens  incredible  Stigginses  and 
Chadbands,  but  never  a  minister  of  religion  whose 
faith  causes  him  any  searchings  of  soul.  Even  George 
Eliot's  parsons  —  the  Amos  Bartons,  the  Mr.  Gilfils 
and  Mr.  Casaubons  —  have  no  credal  perplexities. 
She  never  depicts  a  clergyman  undergoing  that  painful 
process  of  detachment  from  the  old  moorings  with 
which  her  own  experience  had  made  her  familiar. 

It  is  with  Mrs.  Humphry  Ward's  memorable  story 
of  "Robert  Elsmere"  that  the  figure  of  the  heretical 
clergyman  comes  prominently  into  fiction;  and  Els- 
mere  was  only  the  leader  of  a  long  procession.  The 
repeated  presentation  in  fiction  of  this  situation  is 
testimony,  if  any  were  needed,  to  the  increasing  com- 
monness of  a  tragic  fact  in  life.  A  clergyman  signs  a 
formula  or  a  set  of  articles,  defining  a  faith  which  he  in 
all  honesty  has  accepted  in  his  childhood,  only  to  find, 
as  his  experience  of  Hf  e  broadens  and  his  studies  of  the 
past  grow  more  profound,  that  it  is  Hterally  impossible 
in  the  present  day  for  a  thoroughly  educated  man  to 


I50  CRITICISMS  OF  LIFE 

accept  the  traditional  creeds  in  the  traditional  sense. 
He  is  then  confronted  with  the  painful  dilemma  either 
of  stifling  his  conscience  to  save  his  living  or  of  sacri- 
ficing the  prospects  of  wife  and  children  on  the  altar 
of  his  own  mental  integrity. 

Mr.  Winston  Churchill  has  faced  this  situation,  and 
in  his  recent  novel  he  presents  what  is  apparently  his 
own  solution  of  the  religious  problem,  as  well  as  his 
conception  of  the  practical  course  which  a  clergyman 
so  placed  should  adopt.  "The  Inside  of  the  Cup"  is 
the  profoundest  presentation  of  its  theme  yet  given 
to  us  in  fiction.  My  reason  for  rating  the  book  thus 
highly  is  twofold.  First,  Mr.  Churchill's  heretical 
clergyman  becomes  aware  of  the  ethical  gulf  between 
the  faith  and  the  lives  of  his  wealthy  parishioners,  as 
well  as  of  the  difficulties  presented  by  the  creeds;  and 
secondly,  the  author  makes  his  hero,  after  the  new 
revelation  has  come  to  him,  decide  to  stay  within  the 
Church  instead  of  abandoning  his  position  there.  ^ 

Of  Mr.  ChurchilFs  powers  of  literary  craftsmanship 
it  is  perhaps  late  in  the  day  to  speak.  He  has  had  the 
courage  to  revive  the  long  novel.  It  is  true  that  he 
has  not  yet  attained  to  the  dimensions  of  Dickens 
and  Thackeray,  but  he  does  present  us  with  canvases 
large  enough  to  allow  for  detailed  pictures  of  the  minds 
of  his  characters.  And,  despite  the  length  of  his  books, 
they  do  not  fail  to  satisfy  that  difficult  canon  of  literary 

1  On  this  second  point,  however,  it  is  only  fair  to  remember  that 
Mr.  Churchill  was  anticipated  by  Mrs.  Humphry  Ward  in  The  Case 
oj  Richard  Meynell. 


CLERICAL   "HERESY"  151 

criticism  which  was  laid  down  by  Mr.  Samuel  Weller. 
When  Mr.  Weller,  Senior,  criticizes  the  abrupt  ending 
of  his  son's  love-letter  in  the  words,  "That's  rayther 
a  sudden  pull-up,  Sammy,''  his  son  demurs  on  the 
ground  that  "She'll  wish  there  was  more  of  it,  and 
that's  the  great  art  o'  letter-writin'."  It  is  certainly  a 
tribute  to  Mr.  Churchill's  art  that  after  five  hundred 
closely  printed  pages  he  generally  leaves  his  reader 
wishing  there  was  more  of  it. 

Another  characteristic  of  this  writer's  work  that 
fully  justifies  his  wide  popularity  is  his  power  of  seiz- 
ing some  main  trend  of  the  nation's  evolution  and 
linking  up  with  this  the  detailed  development  of  the 
careers  of  his  characters.  He  does  not  give,  as  did 
Dickens,  pictures  of  quiet  lives  apparently  quite  un- 
connected with  the  evolution  of  the  social  group 
amidst  which  they  live.  Mr.  Churchill's  characters  live 
in  time,  and  therefore  they  grow  and  change;  the  crea- 
tions of  Dickens  inhabit  eternity,  and  neither  wax 
nor  wane.  ^Mr.  Churchill  watches  what  main  currents 
draw  the  years,  and  in  the  marshalling  of  his  charac- 
ters and  incidents  we  are  conscious  of  the  great  trend 
as  well  as  of  private  and  personal  developments. 

In  "The  Inside  of  the  Cup"  he  seems  less  at  his 
ease  with  his  theme  than  in  earlier  novels — such,  for 
example,  as  "Coniston"  and  "The  Crisis."  One  feels 
more  sense  of  strain  and  effort  in  the  working-out  of 
the  plot.  This  is  doubtless  due  to  the  nature  of  the 
subject-matter,  and,  though  an  artistic  defect,  it  indi- 


152  CRITICISMS  OF   LIFE 

cates  the  seriousness  with  which  the  novelist  has  faced 
his  task.  There  is  the  same  skill  in  characterization 
to  which  Mr.  Churchill's  readers  are  accustomed.  The 
men,  as  usual,  are  highly  individualized  and  differ- 
entiated; and  the  women,  also  as  usual,  are  better  than 
the  men.  The  heroine  is  a  worthy  successor  to  Vir- 
ginia Carvel  and  Cynthia  Wetherell  —  a  blend  of  them, 
with  perhaps  an  infusion  of  Miss  Letitia  Penniman. 
Unfortunately,  as  the  plot  develops,  the  author  be- 
comes so  interested  in  his  hero  and  heroine,  and  in  the 
spiritual  interests  that  absorb  them,  that  he  forgets 
all  about  the  other  characters,  so  that  the  close  of  the 
book  is  a  tangle  of  loose  ends,  and  we  do  not  learn  what 
becomes  of  several  people  in  whom  we  are  interested. 
But  perhaps  this  means  that  there  is  to  be  a  sequel. 

A  very  brief  resume  of  the  chief  points  of  the  story 
will  facilitate  the  reader's  appreciation  of  my  criti- 
cism. We  are  introduced  to  the  members  of  the  most 
fashionable  Episcopal  church  in  a  great  city  of  the 
Middle  West,  whose  old  rector.  Dr.  Oilman,  has  re- 
cently died.  The  younger  people  of  the  congregation 
are  troubled  by  the  disharmony  between  the  religious 
teaching  they  have  received  and  the  scientific  prin- 
ciples and  historical  beliefs  imbibed  in  their  university 
courses.  They,  however,  have  no  hand  in  the  appoint- 
ment of  Dr.  Oilman's  successor.  The  vestry,  whose 
task  it  is  to  fill  the  vacant  place,  are  a  set  of  more  or 
less  sincerely  orthodox  men,  who  yet  have  no  intention 
of  permitting  the  Church  as  an  ethical  force  to  inter- 


CLERICAL   "HERESY"  153 

fere  with  the  conduct  of  their  business  Kves.  They  are 
capitalists  to  a  man,  and  almost  all  of  them  under  the 
thumb  of  a  master  spirit,  Eldon  Parr,  a  multi-million- 
aire who  has  risen  from  nothing  by  means  of  financial 
genius  and  unscrupulousness.  The  vestry  under  the 
circumstances  naturally  want  a  "safe"  man,  "one 
who  does  not  mistake  Socialism  for  Christianity, '^  and 
who  can  be  relied  upon  to  preach  the  same  gospel  that 
they  have  always  listened  to.  As  seems  to  be  usual  in 
modern  business,  they  turn  for  help  to  their  corpora- 
tion lawyer,  one  Langmaid,  who  undertakes  a  journey 
to  the  New  England  town  in  which  he  was  born,  for 
the  purpose  of  importing  a  suitable  rector.  He  returns 
with  the  Reverend  John  Hodder,  who  has  never  yet 
said  an  unorthodox  word  and  has  given  no  evidence  of 
possessing  anything  so  stupendous  and  dangerous  as  a 
political  or  economic  opinion.  The  vestry  are  delighted 
with  Langmaid's  discovery,  and  Hodder  is  universally 
liked  by  the  congregation,  although  the  yoimger  mem- 
bers of  it  remain  as  dissatisfied  as  ever,  feeling  that 
there  is  some  invisible  barrier  which  prevents  them 
from  getting  into  contact  with  his  mind. 

A  year  or  so  in  his  new  parish  brings  about  a  total 
change  in  the  new  incumbent's  outlook.  After  a  period 
of  singular  friendship  with  Eldon  Parr,  based  largely 
on  pity  for  the  man's  solitude  and  evident  imhappiness, 
he  begins  to  discover  disquieting  evidence  of  the  way 
in  which  his  chief  vestryman's  wealth  and  power  have 
been  built  up.  He  hears  whispers  of  a  financial  trans- 


154  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

action  over  the  street-car  service,  by  which  unprofit- 
able lines,  quietly  purchased  by  Parr  and  his  associates, 
had  been  re-sold  to  themselves  under  another  name 
at  a  fabulous  price,  paid  by  the  unsuspecting  public 
in  return  for  worthless  stock  and  share  certificates. 

Distressed  by  his  inability  to  get  the  slum  people 
into  his  church,  Hodder  goes  on  quest  in  the  slums, 
where  he  speedily  stumbles  across  reality  and  the 
twentieth  century.  The  first  and  finest  person  he  meets 
there,  Mr.  Horace  Bentley,  proves  to  be  one  whom 
Parr  had  quietly  but  legally  robbed  of  his  fortune 
twenty  years  before.  Hodder  makes  Bentley's  ac- 
quaintance when  'trying  to  minister  to  the  wife  and 
sick  child  of  one  Garvin,  a  workingman  who  had  in- 
vested his  life's  savings  of  five  thousand  dollars  in  the 
Consolidated  Traction  enterprise,  on  the  strength  of 
his  faith  in  Eldon  Parr,  only  to  lose  every  cent  he  had. 
Broken  in  health  by  his  loss,  and  unable  to  find  em- 
ployment, the  poor  fellow  finally  resorts  to  suicide. 
Hodder  also  learns  that  one  of  his  leading  vestr3nnen, 
Ferguson,  proprietor  of  the  city's  greatest  department 
store,  is  paying  to  the  girls  in  his  employ  wages  which 
impel  many  of  them  to  a  life  of  shame. 

On  the  other  hand,  the  rector's  confidence  in  the 
orthodox  faith  is  severely  shaken  by  the  questions  put 
to  him  by  some  of  the  finest  young  people  in  his  con- 
gregation. He  also  undergoes  serious  searching  of  soul 
when  asked  by  a  Mrs.  Constable,  whom  he  highly 
respects,  to  re -marry  her  divorced  daughter.  As  a 


CLERICAL   "HERESY"  155 

High  Churchman,  holding  the  Catholic  theory  of  the 
indissolubility  of  marriage,  he  feels  compelled  to  de- 
cline the  request;  but  the  incident  leaves  a  permanent 
mark  upon  him.  Perplexed  and  bewildered  at  the 
abysses  which  seem  suddenly  to  have  opened  beneath 
his  feet,  he  decides  to  stay  in  the  city  for  the  summer 
instead  of  going  East  on  a  vacation,  and  gives  up  his 
time  to  study  and  thought,  with  the  result  that  by  the 
end  of  the  summer  he  has  arrived  at  a  reconstruction 
of  his  creed  and  an  insight  into  social  problems,  on  the 
strength  of  which  he  feels  compelled  to  remain  in  the 
Church,  but  to  preach  a  gospel  fundamentally  different 
from  that  which  he  had  formerly  expounded. 

If  I  may  venture  on  a  word  of  criticism,  I  would  say 
that  Mr.  Hodder  is,  on  the  one  side,  incredibly  inno- 
cent when  he  leaves  his  New  England  parish,  and  tha* 
on  the  other,  his  development  when  confronted  witL 
the  new  problems  is  almost  inconceivably  rapid.  It  is 
difficult  to  believe  that  a  man  so  active-minded  could 
have  remained  all  his  life  so  blind  to  the  economic  and 
social  facts  of  contemporary  society  as  he  is  repre- 
sented as  being.  Nor  is  it  altogether  vraisemblable  that 
a  clergyman  should  arrive  so  rapidly  at  a  compara- 
tively mature  reconstruction  and  reinterpretation  of 
faith,  such  as  that  which  Hodder  attains  in  the  course 
of  one  summer's  reading.  Nor,  again,  is  the  logic 
of  his  apparent  inference  from  the  corrupt  lives  of 
his  vestrymen  to  the  falsity  of  the  creed  they  profess 
altogether  convincing.    Many  a  High  Churchman  is 


156  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

entirely  clear-sighted  as  to  the  conditions  under  which 
wealth  is  to-day  produced  and  distributed,  and  per- 
fectly aware  of  the  irreconcilable  clash  between  the 
ethical  code  professed  by  milUonaires  in  church  on 
Sunday  and  that  upon  which  they  act  on  the  other 
days  of  the  week.  Yet  these  High  Churchmen  do  not 
conclude  that  the  faith  professed  on  Sunday  must 
therefore  be  false.  They  maintain  rather  that  it  is  the 
very  truth  of  the  doctrine  which  makes  it  serviceable 
as  a  cloak  for  hypocrisy.  It  is  the  very  elevation  of  the 
ethical  standard  of  Christianity  which  makes  the  im- 
scrupulous  exploiter  of  his  fellows  desire  the  moral 
prestige  which  comes  from  lip-service  to  it. 

Nor  can  we  be  fully  satisfied  with  the  theoretical 
reconstruction  of  religion  in  which  Mr.  Hodder  finds 
rest.  His  new  doctrine  is  widely  held  among  honest 
and  sincere  clergymen  of  the  modern  type;  but  it  is 
not  a  solution  satisfactory  to  those  who  have  really 
penetrated  to  the  heart  of  things.  Its  supernaturalistic 
theism  is  taken  for  granted,  and,  although  Hodder 
repudiates  the  miraculous  doctrines  of  the  incarna- 
tion and  resurrection  of  Christ,  he  yet  inconsistently 
retains  Christ  as  the  central  sun  of  his  moral  and  spir- 
itual system.  The  real  trend  of  democratic  religion  in 
our  time  is  leading  us  quite  away  from  this  placing 
of  Christ  at  the  centre  of  the  spiritual  universe.  The 
change  is  analogous  to  that  which  took  place  in  astro- 
nomy when  men  ceased  to  look  upon  the  earth  as  the 
centre  of  the  world  and  discovered  that  the  sun  is  the 


CLERICAL   "HERESY"  157 

pivot  of  the  solar  system.  Just  as  the  physical  world 
is  no  longer  geocentric,  so  the  spiritual  world  can  no 
longer  be  Christo-centric.  Deep  and  grateful  as  our 
reverence  for  the  Founder  of  Christianity  may  be,  we 
can  no  longer  assent  to  the  claim  that  he  is  unique, 
unapproachable,  and  all-sufficient  for  the  spiritual, 
ethical  and  intellectual  needs  of  human  society. 

Yet  Mr.  Hodder's  resting-place  is  far  in  advance 
of  his  starting-point.  It  is  a  great  moral  progress  to 
abandon,  as  he  does,  the  doctrines  of  the  virgin  birth 
and  physical  resurrection  of  Christ,  not  as  impossibil- 
ities but  as  impertinences.  These  theories  (the  former 
of  which  was  not  in  the  Gospels  as  they  were  first 
written,  and  the  latter  of  which  has  clearly  grown  out 
of  subjective  visions  like  that  of  St.  Paul)  are  visibly 
the  invention  of  pedantic  and  unspiritual  minds,  who 
felt  that  the  greatness  and  purity  of  the  character  of 
Christ  needed  to  be  accoimted  for  miraculously.  We 
are  to-day  advancing  to  the  point  where  we  see  good- 
ness to  be  as  much  a  part  of  man's  nature  as  sin.  Our 
sense  of  the  inherent  dignity  of  hvunanity  is  teaching  us 
that  it  is  not  the  greatness  of  the  great  and  the  purity 
of  the  pure  which  need  to  be  explained,  but  the  little- 
ness and  baseness  of  the  mass  of  men.  It  is  these  qual- 
ities which  we  feel  to  be  inconsistent  with  hiunanity. 
The  great,  pure,  clear-eyed  personality  embodies  what 
we  expect  of  mankind.  He  is  the  norm,  the  standard; 
and  it  is  declensions  from  this  standard  which  we  feel 
called  upon  to  explain.  Thus  the  chief  case  against  the 


158  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

miraculous  is  now  seen  to  be  its  moral  irrelevance,  — 
its  implication  that  goodness  and  greatness  in  human 
character  are  unnatural,  and  only  to  be  accounted 
for  by  irruptions  of  a  higher  order  into  the  human 
sphere. 

Probably  the  question  most  provocative  of  discus- 
sion in  connection  with  Mr.  Churchill's  novel  will  be 
the  one  raised  by  Hodder's  conduct  in  remaining  in  the 
Church  after  he  has  abandoned  the  traditional  inter- 
pretation of  the  creeds  and  articles  of  religion  which 
he  had  accepted.  As  this  is  the  most  important  issue 
which  the  book  raises,  we  may  be  pardoned  for  dealing 
with  it  at  some  length. 

The  answer  to  the  question  whether  an  heretical 
clergyman  has  a  moral  right  to  remain  in  his  Church 
(until  such  time  as  his  plain  speaking  leads  to  his  ex- 
pulsion) must  depend  upon  one's  view  of  the  nature 
and  sociological  function  of  the  Church.  That  nature 
and  function  cannot  be  discovered  by  reading  the 
Church's  official  account  of  itself.  It  would  doubtless 
explain  (as  it  does  in  the  Athanasian  Creed)  that  it 
exists  to  maintain  the  integrity  of  the  theological  faith 
of  its  members,  to  preserve  undiluted  the  doctrine 
entrusted  to  its  charge,  and  thus  to  secure  the  salva- 
tion of  souls  in  a  life  after  death.  Its  explanation 
would  carry  with  it  the  implication  that  any  man  who 
does  not  hold  strictly  every  article  of  its  creed  has 
neither  part  nor  lot  in  its  communion;  and  conse- 


CLERICAL   "HERESY"  159 

quently  it  would  expect  the  Hodders  and  Robert 
Elsmeres  to  resign  their  livings  the  moment  they  can 
no  longer  conscientiously  proclaim  the  traditional 
theories. 

We  shall  learn,  however,  to  take  a  truer  view  of  the 
nature  and  function  of  the  Church  if  we  compare  it 
with  the  civil  State.  The  civil  State  at  any  given 
moment  is  committed  to  the  upholding  of  a  certain 
constitution  and  certain  laws.  Yet  nobody  expects  a 
man  who  desires  changes  in  those  laws  or  that  con- 
stitution to  expatriate  himself  from  the  State  and  to 
remain  apart  from  it  until  the  alterations  he  desires 
have  been  effected.  On  the  contrary,  we  all  recognize 
that  there  is  no  absolute  finality  about  written  laws 
and  constitutions;  and  that  it  is  often  precisely  the 
most  patriotic  citizen  who  desires  to  bring  about 
changes  in  them.  We  see,  therefore,  that  there  is  no 
conflict  between  the  retention  of  citizenship  and  the 
desire  for  innovation  in  the  State. 

Now  those  who  frankly  take,  as  I  do,  the  view  that 
the  Church  is  every  whit  as  much  a  human  institution 
as  the  civil  State,  can  find  no  difficulty  in  reconciling 
the  retention  of  church  membership  with  desire  for 
change  in  ecclesiastical  creeds  and  formulas.  We  main- 
tain that  it  was  not  the  creeds  that  produced  the 
Church,  but  the  Church  that  produced  the  creeds. 
The  Church,  therefore,  is  prior  to  its  own  formula- 
tions. They  were  made  for  it,  not  it  for  them;  there- 
fore the  Church  is  lord  also  of  its  creeds.  We  maintain 


i6o  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

that  the  function  of  the  Church  in  the  world  is  to  act 
as  the  standard-bearer  of  human  ideals,  to  insist  upon 
the  distinction  between  the  Hfe  of  the  senses  and  the 
life  of  the  spirit,  to  release  the  "angel  heart  of  man" 
from  the  grip  of  ape  and  tiger,  and  to  make  channels 
for  the  streams  of  himaan  love  and  service,  so  that  the 
finer  energies  of  the  spirit  may  be  released  from  the 
trammels  of  the  baser  nature,  both  of  the  individual 
and  of  society,  and  poured  forth  in  beneficent  service 
to  all. 

It  must  necessarily  follow  from  such  a  conception 
that  the  Church  not  only  may,  but  does,  carry  within 
itself  the  forces  and  machinery  by  which  to  effect  its 
own  evolutionary  transformation.  A  Church  fettered 
absolutely  to  the  past,  incapable  of  revising  its  creeds 
and  formularies,  would  be  as  unnatural  an  institution 
as  a  civil  State  which  could  not  modify  or  repeal  any 
of  its  old  laws  or  enact  any  new  ones.  Such  bondage 
to  the  letter  and  to  the  dead  hand  of  the  past  is  to- 
tally at  variance  with  the  post  -  Darwinian  concep- 
tion of  life  as  a  process  of  growth  and  change.  A 
Church  which  was  really  in  the  position  in  which 
Catholics  suppose  their  Church  to  stand  would  be  not 
merely  an  anachronism  but  a  downright  impossibility. 
The  eternal  self  -  identity  which  the  Catholic  com- 
munion boasts  must  consist,  if  it  be  a  fact,  not  in  the 
formulated  theology  of  creed  and  catechism,  but  in 
an  immutable  bent  of  will  and  direction  of  purpose, 
which,  because  it  animated  the  old  creeds,  can  for  that 


CLERICAL   "HERESY"  i6i 

very  reason  supersede  them  and  reinterpret  itself  in 
fresh  formulations. 

It  is,  therefore,  perfectly  possible  and  consistent  for 
a  man  to  remain  in  a  Church  whose  creed  he  desires  to 
change,  just  as  it  is  possible  for  a  man  to  remain  a 
loyal  citizen  of  a  State  whose  laws  and  constitution  he 
sees  to  need  revision.  For  my  own  part,  then,  I  entirely 
approve  of  the  conduct  of  Mr.  Churchill's  hero  in 
claiming  the  right  to  utter  from  the  pulpit  his  new 
social  vision  and  his  new  insight  into  the  history, 
development  and  purpose  of  the  Church. 

The  popular  feeling  on  this  matter  is,  to  be  sure, 
against  Mr.  Hodder,  and  in  favour  of  the  demands  of 
the  old-fashioned  believers  within  the  Church.  This 
popular  feeling  is  expressed  in  the  colloquial  phrase 
that  a  man  ought  not  to  stay  "where  he  doesn't 
belong."  But  suppose  we  agree  to  this  statement;  the 
question  will  still  remain  to  be  decided,  Where  does 
such  a  man  "belong"?  If  it  be  true  that  the  Church 
stands  ideally  for  moral  integrity,  for  truth  and 
truthfulness,  for  conformity  between  thought  and 
speech,  and  for  the  supremacy  of  the  ethical  ideal  in 
every  region  of  conduct,  how  can  it  be  that  a  man  who 
is  more  than  ordinarily  sincere,  who  is  too  honest  to 
pretend  to  believe  what  he  does  not  believe,  who  feels 
like  a  woimd  the  stain  of  uttering  with  his  mouth  a 
belief  that  his  conscience  denies,  must  for  that  very 
reason  abandon  his  post  in  the  spiritual  army  ?  Do  we 
not  feel  the  absurdity  of  a  course  of  action  on  the  part 


1 62  CRITICISMS   OF   LIFE 

of  such  a  man  which  implies  that  he  has  neither  part 
nor  lot  in  the  one  organization  which  stands  for  ideals, 
and  that  his  true  place  is  in  the  world  of  secular  and 
material  interests  —  that  world  which  is  dominated 
by  the  lust  for  money  and  the  goods  which  money  can 
purchase  ? 

Those  who,  for  the  sake  of  the  ideal  interests  of 
nations,  desire  the  well-being  of  the  Church,  and  yet 
feel  that  the  innovating  thinker  ought  to  abandon  it, 
would  do  well  to  reflect  on  the  position  which  would 
have  ensued  if  Mr.  Hodder  had  resigned  his  charge  at 
St.  John's.  It  is  significant  that  it  is  precisely  the 
enemies  of  justice  and  righteousness  who  wish  him  to 
do  this.  The  morally  blind  financiers,  the  uneasy  hy- 
pocrites who  own  houses  which  are  let  for  purposes 
of  vice,  and  who  are  consciously  pocketing  rents  en- 
hanced by  this  consideration;  the  employers  of  sweated 
labour  who  only  want  to  maintain  the  Church  as  a 
bulwark  against  that  social  indignation  which  would 
imperil  the  possession  of  their  ill-gotten  gains  —  these 
it  is  who  demand  that  the  brave  heretic  should  aban- 
don his  post,  and  who  even  offer  him  a  concealed  bribe, 
in  the  shape  of  a  possible  missionary  bishopric,  if  he 
will  hold  his  tongue  and  step  aside.  In  other  words, 
the  inevitable  result  which  follows  when  men  of  new 
vision  and  exalted  spirit  resign  from  the  Church  is 
that  the  Church  is  left  tenfold  more  in  the  grip  of 
corruption  than  before.  The  forces  of  darkness  and 
retrogression  are  strengthened  and  entrenched,  and  the 


CLERICAL   "HERESY"  163 

man  who  steps  aside  from  the  historical  organization 
of  moral  idealism  inevitably  dooms  himself  to  com- 
parative obscurity  and  ineffectuality. 

If  proof  of  a  statement  so  obvious  be  needed,  I 
would  cite  the  case  of  the  great  ethical  movement  of 
our  own  day  within  the  Roman  Catholic  Church.  The 
one  religious  development  of  modern  times  which  has 
secured  universal  attention  is  that  of  the  school  of  the 
Abbe  Loisy  and  the  late  Father  Tyrrell.  These  are 
men  full  of  the  spirit  which  places  the  things  of  the 
moral  world  above  the  things  of  the  sense  -  world. 
These,  on  the  spiritual  side,  are  worthy  successors  to 
Thomas  a  Kempis,  to  Francis  of  Assisi  and  to  Francis 
of  Sales;  but  they  are  also  permeated  with  the  modern 
spirit  of  intellectual  integrity,  with  the  love  of  exact 
accuracy  which  science  engenders,  and  with  a  deter- 
mination to  reformulate,  at  whatever  cost,  their  theory 
of  the  spiritual  life  in  harmony  with  that  life  itself  as 
they  experience  it.  They  insist  on  their  right  to  re- 
main members  of  the  Catholic  Church  and  to  utter 
from  within  its  borders  the  new  revelation  which  has 
come  to  men  in  modern  days.  By  leaving  the  Church 
they  would  have  played  into  the  hands  of  their  ene- 
mies. They  would  have  been  quietly  ignored,  as  many 
another  equally  fine  spirit  has  been.  But  by  remaining 
within  the  Church  they  compelled  the  worldly-minded 
coterie  of  the  Vatican  to  take  notice  of  them,  and  to 
meet  their  arguments  —  as  best  it  could.  The  result 
was  that  by  the  papal  Encyclical  against  Modernism 


1 64  CRITICISMS  OF  LIFE 

and  by  Cardinal  Mercier's  egregious  Lenten  Pastoral 
against  Father  Tyrrell,  the  Vatican  and  its  instru- 
ments made  themselves  intellectually  and  morally  the 
laughing-stock  of  Europe.  Inadvertently  they  gave 
to  Modernism  a  publicity  and  a  prestige  which  it 
could  not  otherwise  have  secured,  and  which  are  suf- 
ficiently great  to  make  permanent  and  imperishable 
the  work  of  George  Tyrrell  and  his  coadjutors. 

The  result  of  the  alternative  policy  can  be  shown 
to  have  been  unquaUfiedly  disastrous  to  mankind. 
When  the  Reformation  broke  out,  the  finest  spirits 
desired  to  reform  the  Church  from  within,  so  as  to 
avoid  the  necessity  of  schism.  Such  men  as  Erasmus 
and  Colet  and  Sir  Thomas  More  saw  as  clearly  as 
did  Luther  the  necessity  for  reformation.  No  reader  of 
Erasmus's  ^Commentaries  on  the  New  Testament" 
can  doubt  that  he  stood  as  emphatically  for  ethical 
Christianity,  and  was  as  strong  in  his  repudiation  of 
the  mountain-heaps  of  mediaeval  dogmatism,  as  any 
Modernist  to-day.  To  More's  liberality  of  thought, 
and  to  his  profound  and  far-sighted  conviction  of  the 
possibility  of  religious  union  without  credal  uniform- 
ity, the  ^'  Utopia ''  is  a  perennial  witness.  These  men 
and  their  fellow-Humanists  desired  a  radical  purga- 
tion of  the  Church,  both  moral  and  intellectual.  The 
greatest  disaster  of  the  modern  world  was  the  failure 
of  this  policy.  The  successors  of  Luther  acquiesced  in 
their  expulsion  from  the  Church.  They  accepted  their 
position  as  outsiders,  thereby  implicitly  admitting  that 


CLERICAL   "HERESY"  165 

they  had  no  right  within  the  Catholic  fold,  —  and 
also  that  the  obscurantists,  the  friends  of  spiritual 
tyranny  and  moral  obliquity,  were  entitled  to  mono- 
polize the  wealth,  the  prestige  and  the  artistic  and  cul- 
tural traditions  of  the  Church. 

From  then  till  now,  the  individualistic  insanity  of 
separatism  has  continued,  until  we  have  become  blind 
to  the  true  function  of  religion  and  of  the  Church  in 
the  life  of  nations.  We  no  longer  perceive  that  religion 
is  virile  and  beneficent  only  when  it  is  felt  to  be  the 
soul  of  national  and  international  life.  We  overlook 
the  fact  that  every  nation,  in  so  far  as  it  has  ideals  for 
itself  and  for  mankind,  is  a  Church,  to  which  every 
one  of  its  citizens  belongs,  both  in  actual  fact  and 
by  moral  right,  and  whether  he  knows  it  or  not.  We 
think  of  religion  as  a  private,  personal  relation  be- 
tween a  man  and  some  supernatural  source  of  char- 
acter and  power;  and  the  natural  outcome  of  the  prac- 
tices begotten  of  such  an  illusion  is  that  religion  is 
perverted  and  deformed  into  anti-social  absurdities 
like  Christian  Science  and  Mormonism,  and  every 
nation  of  the  modern  world  is  spiritually  divided 
against  itself. 

Whoever  has  studied  the  history  and  the  surviving 
monuments  of  mediaeval  Europe  can  see  at  a  glance 
what  was  the  sociological  function  of  the  CathoUc 
Church.  That  Church  may  give  what  accoimt  of  itself 
it  chooses;  but  the  student  of  history,  psychology  and 
sociology  knows  that  it  did  in  fact  serve  as  the  organ- 


1 66  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

izer  and  unifier  of  the  life  of  mediaeval  nations.  The 
halls  of  the  City  Companies  in  London,  where  the 
merchant  guilds  formerly  met,  with  their  patron  saints 
and  their  religious  observances  connecting  commerce 
with  the  common  ideals,  testify  to  the  union  between 
mediaeval  industry  and  the  larger  spiritual  life  within 
which  it  was  integrated.  The  Church  was  undeniably 
the  patron  of  art,  of  painting,  of  music,  of  sculpture,  of 
architecture,  and  even  of  the  drama.  If  the  Catholic 
Church  was,  as  Matthew  Arnold  said,  "The  prophetic 
soul  of  the  world  dreaming  on  things  to  come,"  it  was  a 
soul  which  more  and  more  was  individuating  itself  into 
nationalities  and  solidary  group-consciousnesses;  and 
the  utter  collapse  of  this  unifier  of  the  life  of  men, 
which  ensued  through  the  wrong  policy  that  prevailed 
in  the  Reformation,  was  the  direct  cause  of  the  spir- 
itual chaos  which  prevails  in  the  world  to-day. 

Whereas  of  old  the  various  interests  of  life  were 
articulated  into  an  interdependent  system,  the  lower 
subordinated  to  the  higher,  and  the  whole  of  life  ori- 
ented towards  spiritual  goals,  there  is  now  scarcely  any 
bond  of  union  within  or  between  nations  except  that 
of  economic  interest.  The  cash  nexus,  which  is  the 
confession  that  we  are  imited  only  in  our  sordid  and 
material  ambitions  —  this  is  the  one  universal  bond  of 
modern  humanity.  If  the  policy  of  Erasmus  and  More 
and  Colet  had  been  followed  out  in  the  past  four  hun- 
dred years,  we  should  have  had  a  world  no  longer  at 
sixes  and  sevens  on  its  spiritual  side  and  united  only  in 


CLERICAL   "HERESY"  167 

its  material  interests,  but  a  world  in  which  national 
and  international  politics,  industry,  art,  education  and 
science  would  have  been  blent  into  an  overarching 
unity  of  common  ideal  purpose.  We  should  have  had 
a  Church  at  once  truly  national  and  truly  catholic.  We 
should  have  had  humanity  fulfilling  itself  in  many 
ways,  in  virtue  of  a  conscious  imity  of  ideal  purpose 
and  goal.  If  it  be  not  too  late  for  the  world  to  attain 
such  imity,  still  the  unification  can  only  be  effected 
through  a  reinterpretation  of  religion  and  a  recon- 
struction of  the  Church.  And  this  can  most  speedily 
be  rendered  possible  by  an  absolute  refusal  on  the 
part  of  those  whose  profession  identifies  them  with  the 
ideal,  to  abandon  that  profession  when  their  vision 
broadens  and  their  knowledge  deepens. 

I  am  not  oblivious  to  the  difficult  moral  problem 
which  confronts  the  heretical  clergyman  in  regard  to 
the  use  of  the  traditional  creeds.  Those  creeds  are 
embodied  in  the  liturgy  of  the  Episcopal  Church,  and 
Mr.  Churchill's  hero  feels  boimd  to  repeat  them  until 
constitutional  authority  releases  him  from  the  obliga- 
tion. But  it  is  a  blind  illiteracy  which  holds  that  the 
creeds  of  Christendom  are  so  univocal  and  definitive 
in  their  meaning  that  there  can  be  no  variety  in  the 
interpretation  placed  upon  them.  There  is,  it  is  true, 
no  more  difficult  and  embarrassing  task  than  that  of 
the  man  who  goes  about  to  interpret  an  ancient  docu- 
ment in  a  sense  which  it  has  been  commonly  assumed 
to  exclude.    The  keener  his  insight,  the  subtler  his 


1 68  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

intelligence,  and  the  profounder  his  honesty,  the  more 
is  he  liable  to  misunderstanding  and  denunciation. 
Such,  for  example,  was  the  fate  of  John  Henry  New- 
man, when,  in  an  effort  to  reconcile  his  changed  beliefs 
with  his  position  in  the  English  Church,  he  sought 
to  place  a  Catholic  construction  on  the  Thirty-nine 
Articles.  The  epithet  of  h3^ocrite  was  promptly 
hurled  at  him.  Obviously,  no  real  hypocrite  would 
have  subjected  himself  to  the  exhausting  labour  and 
the  danger  of  misunderstanding  which  Newman  faced. 
It  was,  indeed,  only  the  exceptional  sincerity  of  the 
man  which  set  him  upon  his  task.  Like  all  acute  think- 
ers, he  could  see  various  intermediate  shades  of  grey 
where  the  vulgar  herd  could  detect  only  dead  blacks 
and  whites.  The  final  resignation  of  Newman  was  an 
injury  to  the  Church  of  England  from  which  it  has 
scarcely  yet  recovered.  Its  result  was  to  cramp  the 
mental  freedom  of  all  who  remained  within  her  borders 
—  not  only  the  High  Church,  but  also  the  Broad 
Church  and  the  Evangelical  parties. 

To  return  for  a  moment  to  our  analogy  between 
Church  and  State:  is  it  not  obvious  that  for  a  man  to 
abandon  the  Church  because  of  corruption  within  it, 
or  because  he  finds  its  dogmas  incredible,  is  exactly 
akin  in  its  results  to  what  happens  when  men  abandon 
political  parties  because  of  corruption  within  them  ? 
The  tragedy  of  American  life  to-day,  as  everybody 
admits,  is  the  reluctance  of  good  men  to  enter  political 
life.  They  feel  that  they  cannot  touch  its  pitch  without 


CLERICAL   '^ HERESY"  169 

being  defiled;  and  the  result  is  that  those  who  have 
no  antipathy  to  the  pitch  are  left,  in  many  cities  and 
States,  with  almost  a  monopoly.  The  only  cure  for 
corruption  in  mimicipal,  State  and  national  politics 
consists  in  the  invasion  of  political  party  life  by  men 
who  have  no  price,  and  whose  single  purpose  is  the 
patriotic  desire  to  promote  the  common  good.  By 
standing  aloof  they  only  encourage  and  entrench  the 
shameless  exploiters  of  the  nation's  life. 

Now,  Edmund  Burke's  famous  dictimi  that  "when 
bad  men  combine,  the  good  must  unite,"  applies  in 
religious  life  as  well  as  in  political.  And  they  must 
imite  in  opposition  not  only  to  conscious  badness,  but 
also  to  moral  blindness,  and  to  the  erroneous  view 
which  mistakes  the  dogmas  of  religion  for  the  life 
of  religion.  They  must  persistently  refuse  to  abandon 
their  standing  -  ground  because  of  apparent  incon- 
sistency between  their  intellectual  positions  and  the 
traditional  ones  of  the  Church. 

A  rule  for  the  guidance  of  clergymen  in  Mr.  Hodder's 
position  might  well  be  formulated  in  the  blunt  phrase, 
"Stay  in  and  speak  out.  Don't  leave  until  you  are 
kicked  out."  Many  men  of  refined  and  sensitive  spirit 
resign  their  pulpits  because  they  cannot  face  the  worry 
of  perpetual  squabbling,  and  also  because  they  think 
it  undignified  to  be  expelled.  But  it  is  perfectly  digni- 
fied to  face  expulsion  when  the  question  at  issue  is  no 
mere  personal  one,  but  one  that  involves  the  fate  of  a 
great  historic  institution,  which  still  stands  nominally, 


I70  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

as  it  always  should  have  stood  in  fact,  for  the  suprem- 
acy of  the  higher  life  of  man. 

The  present  conditions  of  tenure  of  office  for  clergy- 
men place  a  direct  premium  upon  insincerity  and 
hypocrisy.  The  devil  himself  could  have  invented 
nothing  more  ingeniously  maleficent  than  the  system 
which  makes  a  man's  bread  and  butter  depend  upon 
his  continuous  profession  of  a  definitely  formulated 
belief,  whether  he  holds  it  or  not.  One  of  the  many 
stories  told  of  Benjamin  Jowett  at  Oxford  is  that, 
when  his  duties  necessitated  his  reciting  the  creed  in 
chapel,  he  would  insert  sotto  voce  the  words  "used  to," 
so  that  his  creed  ran,  "I  used  to  believe  in  God  the 
Father,"  and  so  forth.  The  delightful  humour  of  the 
legend  cannot  conceal  the  danger  of  demoralization 
incurred  by  clergy  whose  opinions  are  as  heretical  as 
Jowett's.  One  cannot  help  suspecting  (and  the  sus- 
picion is  justified  by  many  actual  experiences  which 
one  is  not  at  liberty  to  relate)  that  if  a  philanthropic 
fund  made  it  possible  for  clergymen,  who  got  into 
trouble  with  their  denominational  authorities  through 
sincere  speech,  to  maintain  their  families  after  expul- 
sion, there  would  be  such  an  outburst  of  what  is  called 
heresy  in  all  orthodox  bodies  as  to  compel  a  radical 
transformation  of  the  theories  of  Christianity. 

The  day  of  the  heresy-hunt  is  not  yet  over,  and  even 
in  a  community  so  modem  as  Chicago  there  have  been 
cases  where  sincere  speech  has  brought  down  upon 
men's  heads  the  thunderbolts  of  the  odium  theologicum. 


CLERICAL   "HERESY"  171 

The  one  thing  that  I  regret  upon  reading  the  life  of 
Professor  Swing,  the  great  Presbyterian  preacher 
of  Chicago,  is  that  after  the  heresy-hunt  against  him 
had  failed  he  resigned  from  the  Presbyterian  body,  be- 
cause he  could  not  bear  to  be  involved  in  perpetual 
bickerings  and  controversy.  American  Presbyterian- 
ism  would  to-day  be  broader,  humaner  and  nobler,  if 
Swing  had  insisted  on  his  right  to  freedom  of  thought 
and  speech  within  that  body.  On  the  other  hand,  it  is 
delightful  to  know  that  when  an  attempt  was  made 
some  years  ago  to  expel  Professor  George  Burman 
Foster  from  the  Baptist  denomination,  he  insisted, 
with  irresistible  logic  and  masterly  scholarship,  that 
he  was  as  good  a  Baptist  as  any  of  his  opponents,  and 
had  a  perfect  moral  right  to  remain  within  the  same 
fold  with  them.  As  a  result  of  his  success  in  carrying 
this  point,  the  Baptist  Church  to-day  is  a  finer  thing, 
and  truer  to  its  own  original  inspiration,  than  it  would 
have  been  if  the  heresy-hunters  had  been  suffered  to 
prevail. 

The  foregoing  rule  for  modern-minded  clergymen 
is  applicable,  mutatis  mutandis,  to  the  case  of  laymen. 
Let  them,  from  within  whatever  body  they  may  belong 
to,  insist  that  the  true  function  of  the  Church  is  not  the 
maintenance  of  a  formal  creed  but  the  purification  of 
the  common  life  of  man.  If  they  be  Christians,  let 
them  insist  that  Christianity  is  primarily  an  ethical 
discipline,  the  standard  of  which  is  to  be  found  in  the 
Sermon  on  the  Mount,  the  Parables  and  the  social 


172  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

vision  of  the  New  Testament.  Let  them  proclaim  the 
obvious  fact  that  the  original  test  of  membership  in 
Christ's  kingdom  was  not  the  acceptance  of  a  creed 
but  the  will  to  serve  one's  neighbours.  Or  if  they  be 
Jews,  let  them  point  out  —  what  every  scholar  knows 
to  be  the  truth  —  that  Judaism  was  originally  the 
national  idealism  of  the  Hebrew  people,  with  its  inter- 
est neither  in  metaphysical  theism  nor  in  a  life  after 
death,  but  in  politics,  economics,  civic  law  and  do- 
mestic life.  Let  them  maintain  that  the  very  spirit  in 
the  Jewish  leaders  which  led  them  to  change  repeat- 
edly their  heaven-sent  decalogue  and  to  revise  their 
religious  law-codes  from  time  to  time  to  meet  their 
exigencies,  must  to-day  dictate  a  fundamental  trans- 
formation of  Jewish  doctrine  and  discipline  to  meet  the 
new  conditions  of  the  new  age. 

The  clue  to  the  spiritual  unil&cation  of  mankind  is 
given  us  in  an  aphorism  of  W.  K.  Clifford's.  "Only  in 
a  world  of  sincere  men,"  he  said,  "is  imity  possible; 
but  there,  in  the  long  run,  it  is  as  good  as  certain." 

My  argument  leads  inevitably  to  the  personal  ques- 
tion, "But  why,  if  such  be  your  view  of  the  duties  of 
people  within  the  Church,  are  you  the  spokesman  of  an 
outside  organization?  Why  are  you  the  minister  of  an 
Ethical  Society  ?  "  I  answer  that  the  social  conception 
of  religion,  as  moral  idealism  concreting  itself  in  ethical 
nationalism,  carries  with  it  a  discrimination  between  a 
sect  and  a  party,  which  makes  such  a  position  entirely 
logical  and  clear.  I  have  not  space  here  to  analyze  this 


CLERICAL   "HERESY"  173 

distinction,  but  in  the  works  of  Dr.  Stanton  Coit,  who 
learned  it  not  only  through  his  studies  of  Biblical 
Judaism,  but  also  from  the  profound  teachings  of  Sir 
John  Seeley,  it  is  elaborated  in  detail.^  Those  in  the 
Ethical  Movement  who  hold  this  view  conceive  of  their 
fellowship  as  a  party  within  the  national  religious  life, 
just  as,  for  example,  the  Progressive  Party  is  a  factor 
in  the  political  life  of  this  nation.  And  as  a  political 
party  does  not  isolate  itself,  but  seeks  to  grapple  with 
its  opponents,  for  the  very  purpose  of  arriving  at 
ultimate  unity  of  national  conviction  and  poHty,  so 
we  conceive  of  all  the  denominations  of  religion  as 
co-operative  groups  within  the  national  spiritual  life. 
Among  these  the  Ethical  Society  has  its  natural  place 
as  the  advanced  wing,  the  pioneer  party,  in  which 
tendencies  visibly  at  work  in  all  the  other  churches 
have  come  into  clear  consciousness.  We  are  the  ene- 
mies not  of  other  denominations  as  such,  but  of  the 
spirit  and  policy  of  sectarianism  which  still  animate  so 
many  of  them.  We  are  the  enemies  of  that  conception 
of  religion  which  rests  satisfied  with  denominational 
self-dependence  and  isolation.  We  stand  opposed  to 
this  spirit  precisely  because  we  believe  in  religion  as 
necessary  to  humanity,  and  we  know  that  only  by  the 
breaking  down  of  credal  barriers,  only  by  the  free  inter- 
course of  mind  with  mind  and  Church  with  Church 
(even  though  that  intercourse  at  first  involve  antagon- 

*  See  especially  rAe5<7wZo/^wmca,  by  Stanton  Coit.  (New  York: 
The  Macmillan  Company,  1914.) 


174  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

ism  and  controversy),  can  ultimate  unity  be  attained. 
We  are  not  innovators  in  spirit  and  purpose.  Rather 
for  the  sake  of  the  eternal  spirit  and  the  abiding  pur- 
pose of  religion  do  we  desire  innovation,  in  order  that 
the  nobler  energies  of  the  human  mind  may  be  liber- 
ated and  taught  to  co-operate.  And  we  believe  that 
the  most  effective  declaration  of  their  new  attitude 
which  modern-minded  laymen  in  all  denominations 
can  make  is  to  join  the  Ethical  party  without  renounc- 
ing their  other  religious  affiliations. 

The  modern  attitude  of  the  world  toward  religion  is 
only  partially  expressed  in  Mr.  Churchill's  story  by 
Eleanor  Goodrich.  Her  mother,  unable  to  meet  the 
argiunents  of  the  young  people,  declares  that  an  old 
woman  must  not  be  expected  to  change.  Eleanor 
replies,  "We  don't  want  you  to  change.  It's  ourselves 
we  wish  to  change.  We  wish  for  a  religious  faith  like 
yours,  only  the  same  teaching  which  gave  it  to  you 
is  powerless  for  us."  The  Ethical  Movement  and  the 
other  advanced  wings  of  Christianity  and  Judaism 
have  been  inspired,  if  I  mistake  not,  by  a  like  senti- 
ment in  relation  to  the  more  conservative  churches. 
Only,  instead  of  saying  that  we  wish  for  a  religious 
faith  like  theirs,  we  go  further  and  proudly  claim  that 
we  have  such  a  faith.  We  are  at  one  with  the  Hebrew 
prophets  and  with  the  founder  and  first  apostles  of 
Christianity  in  bent  of  will  and  purpose;  but  with  our 
modern  knowledge,  and  in  view  of  the  complexity 
of  modern  economic  and  social  conditions,  we  say 


CLERICAL   "HERESY"  175 

frankly  that  the  theoretical  counterpart  of  this  voli- 
tional attitude  which  satisfied  the  mind  of  fifteen  hun- 
dred years  ago  is  valueless  for  us.  We  hold  that  the 
creeds  were  nothing  but  the  best  interpretation  pos- 
sible in  their  day  to  account  to  the  intellect  for  the 
bent  of  will  and  spirit  of  self-sacrifice  with  which  it 
was  concretely  associated  in  life.  We  maintain,  fur- 
ther, that  as  experience  widens  every  such  theoretical 
formulation  necessarily  becomes  obsolete.  Every  age 
ought  to  write  its  own  creeds;  but  no  future  age  will 
fall  into'  the  grievous  error  of  ascribing  finality  to  its 
formulations.  The  essence  of  religion,  the  eternal  ele- 
ment in  it,  is  the  Hfe  and  not  the  dogma,  the  bent  of 
will,  the  purpose  of  securing  inward  peace  and  social 
salvation  for  mankind.  Let  this  be  expressed  from 
time  to  time  in  accordance  with  the  fullest  philosophic 
and  scientific  knowledge;  but  let  not  the  formula 
become  a  fetter  and  a  stumblingblock  to  the  spirit 
which  engenders  it. 


CHAPTER  VI 

ELLEN  KEY  AND  THE 

LOVE^ 

It  is  difficult  in  these  days  for  a  man  to  give  utterance 
to  a  platitude  without  incurring  the  suspicion  that  he 
is  indulging  in  paradox.  We  have  become  so  accus- 
tomed to  subordinating  our  own  judgment  to  the 
authority  of  a  sophisticated  literary  minority,  who 
confound  the  exceptional  with  the  general,  that  even 
the  restatement  of  an  obvious  fact  sounds  startling 
and  incredible.  Nevertheless,  the  rule  remains  the  rule, 
and  is  more  worthy  of  attention  than  any  or  all  excep- 
tions to  it  which  may  be  cited;  and  so,  at  the  risk  of 
seeming  paradoxical,  one  must  turn  first  to  it. 

The  startling  platitude,  then,  which  I  would  begin 
by  formulating  is  simply  this:  that  of  all  human  insti- 
tutions the  most  widely  and  permanently  successful 
is  that  of  lifelong  monogamous  marriage.  A  basis  of 
experience  incomparably  great  and  long  justifies  the 
assertion  that  this  method  of  providing  for  the  physical 
and  psychic  needs  of  individuals,  and  for  the  continu- 
ance of  the  human  species,  is  the  one  best  adapted  to 
these  ends.  If  it  were  not  so,  no  amoimt  of  coercion  by 

^  Love  and  Marriage,  translated  from  a  Swedish  work  entitled 
Lifslinjer,  by  Ellen  Key.  The  translation  by  Arthur  G.  Chater,  With 
an  Introduction  by  Havelock  Ellis.     (New  York:  Putnam,  191 2.) 


ELLEN  KEY  AND  FREE  LOVE     177 

authority,  whether  ecclesiastical  or  civil,  could  have 
induced  mankind  permanently  to  endure  it.  More- 
over, there  is  in  modern  communities  very  little  left 
of  this  authoritative  buttressing  of  monogamy.  The 
chains  have  been  broken,  the  whip  wrested  from  the 
driver's  hands;  yet  the  slaves  oddly  persist  for  the 
most  part  in  treading  freely  the  accustomed  path. 

We  hear  much,  to  be  sure,  of  the  multiplication 
of  divorces  in  coimtries  like  America,  where  legalized 
divorce  is  very  easily  obtainable.  What  we  do  not 
hear  much  of  is  the  still  more  important  fact  that  the 
number  of  divorces,  huge  and  menacing  as  it  is,  re- 
mains insignificant  as  compared  with  the  number  of 
marriages  not  dissolved.  The  highest  estimate  I  have 
seen  of  the  total  of  divorces  in  this  country  places  it 
at  one  in  twelve  of  the  total  of  marriages.  Nor  does 
this  mean  that  of  every  twelve  couples  who  marry  one 
is  sundered  by  divorce.  The  statistics  are  swelled  by 
that  naturally  increasing  number  of  men  and  women 
who,  having  once  snapped  an  old  bond  and  accepted  a 
new,  proceed  to  make  a  habit  of  getting  themselves 
divorced.  I  recently  read,  for  instance,  in  the  news- 
paper the  story  of  a  gentleman  who,  having  been 
married  and  divorced,  formed  a  legal  union  with  a 
second  lady;  tiring  of  this  in  a  year  or  two,  he  was 
again  divorced  and  reunited  himself  with  his  wife  —  I 
beg  pardon,  with  his  first  wife;  and  the  newspaper  an- 
nounced in  hiccoughing  head-lines  the  fact  that  he  had 
gone  off  on  a  second  honeymoon  with  the  mother  of  his 


lyS  CRITICISMS  OF  LIFE 

children.''  The  reporter  did  not  seem  to  think  that  the 
circumstances  offered  any  occasion  for  moral  censure. 
One  does  not  look,  indeed,  to  the  ordinary  newspaper  for 
ethical  sanity,  any  more  than  for  general  accuracy  and 
competence  in  the  presentation  of  fact;  but  the  absten- 
tion from  moral  judgment  in  such  a  case  as  this  was 
merely  typical  of  the  general  trend  of  public  opinion 
in  the  United  States  to-day.  The  tone  of  American 
SittUchkeit  with  reference  to  divorce  grows  ever  laxer. 
Beginning  with  tolerance  of  those  whose  unions  were 
terminated  for  good  cause,  it  has  grown  more  and  more 
willing  to  accept  the  divorced  person,  irrespective  of 
the  cause  of  his  or  her  renunciation  of  the  marriage 
vow.  Yet,  even  with  this  added  incentive  to  marital 
laxity,  the  fact  remains  that  permanent  monogamous 
union  is  deliberately  preferred  in  eleven  cases  out  of 
twelve. 

We  must  pause  to  insist  upon  the  significance  of  this 
fact.  British  critics  of  marriage,  such  as  Mr.  Bernard 
Shaw,  affirm  that  the  very  small  number  of  divorces  in 
England  is  wholly  due  to  the  disastrously  barbarous 
condition  of  the  English  divorce  law.  There  is,  of 
course,  some  truth  in  their  assertion;  but  it  is  much  less 
true  than  they  imagine.  A  closer  examination  of  the 
facts  would  disclose  a  truth  which  I  here  mention 
merely  in  passing,  but  to  which  I  must  return  later: 
that  the  bond  which  unites  man  and  wife  is  not  merely 
the  outward  coercion  of  the  law.  The  law  only  regis- 
ters and  reinforces  an  accomplished  fact.  It  does  not 


ELLEN  KEY  AND  FREE  LOVE  179 

unite  people;  they  unite  themselves,  and  it  ratifies  and 
sanctions  their  union.  The  marriage  "contract^'  is  not 
so  much  between  the  man  and  the  woman  as  between 
the  two  of  the  one  part  and  the  community  of  the 
other  part.  The  strength  of  the  marriage  tie  is  accord- 
ingly natural  and  inherent,  as  well  as  artificial  and 
adherent.  The  facts  of  American  experience  prove  my 
point.  Here  is  a  vast  and  heterogeneous  population  in 
whom  the  sense  of  law  and  authority  is  very  decidedly 
weaker  than  in  Europe,  and  for  whom  divorce  in  many 
States  is  made  dangerously  easy.  The  restraining  in- 
fluence of  religion  upon  this  population  is  certainly 
no  stronger,  and  almost  certainly  a  great  deal  weaker, 
than  it  is  in  England.  Yet  with  every  opportimity  for 
laxity,  with  law  and  public  opinion  standing  ready  to 
further  their  inclinations  in  that  direction,  this  popu- 
lation, in  the  proportion  of  eleven  to  one,  voluntarily 
prefers  the  lifelong  monogamous  marriage  bond. 

This  is  the  colossal  fact  which  we  must  bear  care- 
fully in  mind  when  reading  such  outpourings  as  those 
of  Mr.  Shaw  in  the  preface  to  "  Getting  Married,"  and 
of  Miss  Ellen  Key  in  her  book  on  ''Love  and  Mar- 
riage." We  must  be  careful  to  remember  it,  because 
these  writers  never  mention  it.  Yet  the  fact  is  one 
which  makes  us  detect  a  note  of  unconscious  absurd- 
ity in  the  indictments  they  draw  up  against  lifelong 
monogamy.  If  what  they  say  were  true,  this  irre- 
deemably bad  institution  must  long  since  have  de- 
stroyed humanity.  Mr.  Shaw  declares  that  the  corner- 


i8o  CRITICISMS   OF   LIFE 

stone  of  the  system  which  produces  all  our  social  dis- 
asters is  "the  family  and  the  institution  of  marriage 
as  we  have  it  [sic]  to-day  in  England."  *  In  simi- 
lar fashion,  Miss  Ellen  Key  pictures  marriage  as  an 
incredibly  savage  and  morally  imendurable  institu- 
tion:— 

Whatever  abuses  free  divorce  may  involve,  they  can- 
not often  be  worse  than  those  which  marriage  has  pro- 
duced and  still  produces  —  marriage,  which  is  degraded 
to  the  coarsest  sexual  habits,  the  most  shameless  traffic, 
the  most  agonising  soul  -  murders,  the  most  inhuman 
cruelties,  and  the  grossest  infringements  of  liberty  that 
any  department  of  modem  life  can  show.^ 

Whereupon  one  can  only  express  a  mild  wonder  that 
the  revolted  conscience  of  mankind  has  not  long  since 
risen  and  annihilated  the  abominable  thing!  But, 
again,  we  must  keep  our  balance  —  we  must  remember 
the  eleven  couples  out  of  twelve,  who  are  as  free  to 
dissolve  their  bonds  as  the  one  couple  in  twelve  that 
does  so.  How  comes  it  that  no  glinuner  of  the  ineffable 
spiritual  refinement  of  Mr.  Shaw  and  Miss  Key  has 
broken  through  the  darkness  of  their  souls  ? 

The  truth  is  that  this  modern  attack  on  marriage, 
in  its  one-sidedness,  and  its  failure  either  to  remember 
the  exceptionahiess  of  the  exceptional  or  to  grasp  the 
good  points  of  what  it  attacks,  is  almost  grotesque.  It 
reminds  one  irresistibly  of  a  ludicrous  incident  which 

*  The  Doctor^ s  Dilemma,  etc.,  p.  120  (Preface  to  Getting  Married). 
(London:  Constable,  19 11.) 
^  2  Love  and  Marriage,  p.  290. 


ELLEN  KEY  AND  FREE  LOVE  i8i 

happened  a  few  years  ago  in  England.  One  of  the 
cheap  newspapers,  —  cheap  in  every  sense  of  the  word, 

—  wishing  to  advertise  itself,  started  a  campaign  of 
denunciation  against  the  ordinary  white  bread  of  com- 
merce. It  declared  that  this  bread  contained  none 
of  the  nutritive  properties  of  the  grain,  and  therefore 
that  to  eat  it  was  merely  to  injure  one's  digestive  sys- 
tem without  receiving  any  benefit.  For  this  reason,  it 
recommended  to  its  readers  a  new  kind,  called  "Stand- 
ard Bread."  The  public  was  appalled,  and  began  to 
rush  eagerly  to  the  shops  of  those  bakers  whose  signs 
announced  that  they  sold  the  new  style  of  bread.  The 
bubble  was  pricked,  however,  when  some  man  who 
had  not  entirely  lost  his  sense  of  humour  arose  and 
asked,  "What  is  the  use  of  telling  us  that  there  is  no 
food  value  but  only  poison  and  disaster  in  a  thing 
upon  which  we  have  all  been  living  healthily  all  our 
lives  ?  "  To  the  credit  of  the  English  public  be  it  said 
that  this  self-evident  fact  at  once  convinced  them  of 
the  absurdity  of  their  alarm.  "Standard  Bread"  was 
promptly  forgotten,  and  the  newspaper  proceeded  to 
manufacture  fresh  methods  of  self-advertisement. 

Which  things  are  an  allegory;  and  after  reading  Mr. 

Shaw,  Miss  Key  and  a  niunber  of  other  wearisomely 

old-fashioned  ^  modern  thinkers,  one  can  only  ask  them 

to  resuscitate  their  comatose  sense  of  humour.   What 

is  the  use  of  their  telling  us  that  marriage  is  anti-social, 

1  This  adjective  is  used  advisedly.   The  writers  in  question  have 
not  an  idea  among  them  of  later  date  than  the  fourth  century  B.C. 

—  as  every  reader  of  Plato's  Republic  knows. 


1 82  CRITICISMS  OF  LIFE" 

anti-human,  degrading  and  soul-murdering,  and  all  the 
rest  of  it,  when  the  nations  of  the  world  that  are  most 
advanced,  both  spiritually  and  economically,  have  been 
healthily  living  by  it  all  their  lives  ? 

Miss  Key,  of  course,  is  not  backward  in  advocating 
what  she  thinks  the  right  alternative  to  the  system  she 
condemns.  Every  healthy  woman  is  to  be  recognized 
by  law  as  having  a  right  to  motherhood,  whether  mar- 
riage^be  for  her  possible  or  desirable  or  not.  She  is  to 
be  safeguarded  and  respected  by  public  opinion  as  well 
as  by  law,  and  pecuniary  provision,  when  necessary,  is 
to  be  made  for  her  and  for  the  children  born  under 
such  conditions.  The  permanence,  or  otherwise,  of  her 
relations  with  the  father  (or  fathers)  of  her  children  is 
to  be  nobody's  business  but  her  own,  and  none  may 
dare  to  stigmatize  either  her  male  accessories  or  the 
offspring.  Divorce  is  to  be  absolutely  free  and  uncon- 
ditional —  that  is,  it  is  to  be  granted  upon  the  request 
of  both  parties,  or  of  one,  provided  such  request  be 
persisted  in  for  a  definite  period.  This  involves  the 
position  that,  however  unwilling  either  the  man  or  the 
woman  may  be  to  accept  the  sunderance,  it  is  never- 
theless to  be  effected.  If  a  man  tires  of  his  wife, 
he  notifies  some  legal  official  of  the  circumstance.  A 
year  later  he  reaffirms  his  decision,  and  automatically 
thereupon,  without  any  question  as  to  his  reasons  or 
his  future  intentions,  the  divorce  is  conceded.  The 
fact  that  his  wife,  the  mother  of  his  children,  may  be 
absolutely  innocent  and  violently  opposed  to  the  pro- 


ELLEN  KEY  AND  FREE  LOVE     183 

ceeding  is  not  to  count  at  all;  nor  are  the  children 
to  be  consulted. 

It  is  obvious  that,  with  divorce  on  such  terms, 
with  no  questions  asked,  and  with  the  right  to  extra- 
marital motherhood  sanctioned  by  law  to  every 
woman  (and,  by  necessary  implication,  the  right  to 
extra-marital  fatherhood  granted  and  guaranteed  to 
every  man),  marriage  would,  so  far  as  the  law  is  con- 
cerned, be  virtually  abolished.  The  great  principle  of 
individualistic  anarchism,  that  the  relations  of  the 
sexes  are  the  mere  private  affair  of  the  persons  imme- 
diately concerned,  would  be  established.  Public  opin- 
ion might  indeed  continue  upon  eugenic  grounds  to 
uphold  certain  standards  of  chastity  and  continence; 
it  might  continue  to  maintain  that  the  general  and 
permanent  well-being  of  the  race  must  be  the  para- 
mount consideration  of  every  man  and  woman;  but  it 
could  neither  itself  condemn  nor  ask  the  law  to  pro- 
hibit any  making  or  breaking  of  unions  between  men 
and  women. 

It  is  only  just  that,  before  proceeding  to  criticism 
of  such  proposals,  one  should  pay  a  tribute  of  respect 
to  the  purity  and  nobility  of  purpose  which  animate 
some,  at  least,  of  their  advocates.  In  this  category  I 
wish  quite  imequivocally  to  place  both  Mr.  Shaw  and 
Miss  Key.  It  would  be  wholly  unfair  to  accuse  or 
suspect  either  of  them  of  anti-social  intent.  As  my 
present  concern  is  mainly  with  Miss  Key,  I  wish  to 
testify  that  the  study  of  her  works  produces  a  strong 


1 84  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

conviction  of  her  purity  and  sincerity  in  thought  and 
purpose.  She  has  also  rendered  an  important  service 
in  two  respects.  First,  she  has,  with  admirable  cour- 
age, laid  bare  a  side  of  woman's  nature  which  has 
generally  been  concealed  from  men,  and  to  which  men 
have  consequently  failed  to  do  justice.  She  deserves 
credit  for  a  perfect  candour  in  this  matter,  without 
which  its  adequate  discussion  would  be  impossible,  and 
also  for  a  fine  and  discriminating  artistic  skill  in  the 
presentation  of  the  facts,  without  which  candour  itself 
might  be  useless  and  would  certainly  be  repellent.  The 
second  service  for  which  I  wish  to  thank  her,  relates  to 
a  matter  in  which  she  is  at  variance  with  Mr.  Shaw 
and  certain  other  critics  of  marriage  and  family  life. 
She  sees  clearly  that  the  family  is  the  true  social  unit 
—  "true"  in  the  sense  that  it  is  necessitated  by  the 
physical  and  psychic  nature  and  needs  of  the  children. 
The  child  has  a  right  to  a  father  as  well  as  to  a  mother, 
and  its  due  "nurture  and  admonition"  demands  the 
co-operation  of  the  two  parents.  How  this  doctrine 
can  be  made  to  consist  with  Miss  Key's  other  proposals 
is  a  matter  which  we  must  leave  to  her  to  settle.  What 
sort  of  homes  those  will  be  in  which  Johnny  calls  Mr. 
Jones  his  father  to-day,  and  Mr.  Brown  next  week,  it 
is  not  at  once  easy  to  understand.  There,  however,  is 
the  situation;  and  I  wish  to  acknowledge  the  soundness 
of  Miss  Key's  plea  for  the  home,  while  confessing  my 
inability  to  understand  how  she  reconciles  it  with  her 
other  proposals. 


ELLEN  KEY  AND  FREE  LOVE     185 

But,  while  admitting  her  nobility  and  purity  of  pur- 
pose, I  find  evidences  in  her  work  of  two  serious  defects, 
which  vitiate  her  practical  proposals  for  remed)dng 
the  evils  associated  with  our  present  law  and  cus- 
tom. She  seems,  in  the  first  place,  to  suffer  from  a 
certain  blindness  in  the  discrimination  of  moral  dis- 
tinctions: that  is,  she  frequently  makes  suggestions 
which  imply  that  the  moral  quality  of  certain  lines  of 
action  can  be  changed  by  changing  their  name,  and 
that  things  immoral  in  themselves  can  be  made  right 
by  being  sanctioned  by  law.  The  second  defect,  corre- 
lative to  this,  is  an  inability  to  foresee  the  social  con- 
sequences which  would  necessarily  ensue  if  public  sanc- 
tion were  given  to  her  proposals.  These  are  the  chief 
shortcomings  of  her  work.  Her  obliviousness  to  the 
evils  which  her  doctrine  would  let  loose  upon  society 
is  in  a  certain  sense  honourable  to  her.  She  reasons 
too  freely  from  her  own  aesthetic  and  ethical  standards 
to  those  of  humanity  at  large.  Living  herself  on  a 
plane  of  exaltation  and  serenity  "above  the  smoke  and 
stir  of  this  dim  spot  which  men  call  earth,"  she  fails 
to  realize  the  formidable  strength  of  the  baser  nature 
in  ordinary  men  and  women,  and,  for  that  reason,  does 
not  see  what  floods  of  evil  would  be  liberated  by  the 
removal  of  the  locks  and  dams  of  law  and  social  senti- 
ment which  at  present  restrain  them.  I  shall  sub- 
sequently set  forth  the  evidence  upon  which  these  two 
assertions  are  based. 

Probably  the  simplest  and  most  convenient  way  of 


1 86  CRITICISMS  OF  LIFE 

introducing  one's  criticism  will  be  to  state  one's  own 
conviction  as  to  the  wise  and  right  method  of  providing 
for  the  needs  of  individuals  and  of  human  society, 
in  this  supremely  important  matter.  My  own  ideal, 
therefore,  is  that  marriage  should  be  a  union  of  one  man 
and  one  woman  for  so  long  as  they  both  shall  live.  So 
old-fashioned  a  doctrine  will  not  commend  itself  to 
those  seekers  after  new  truth  who  imagine  that  all  old 
truth  must  be  discarded  when  new  is  discovered.  I 
may,  however,  succeed  to  some  extent  in  placating 
them  by  the  assertion  that  I  hold  this  view  in  no  sense 
upon  the  authority  of  any  Church  or  of  any  theological 
creed.  I  do  not  believe  in  indissoluble  monogamy 
because  Christ  commanded  it.  I  am  by  no  means 
certain  that  he  did  so.  My  belief  in  it  reposes  upon 
grounds  of  agelong  and  widespread  human  experience, 
and  would  remain  unshaken,  even  if  it  could  be  shown 
that  Christ  had  authorized  polygamy,  or  if  the  Cath- 
olic Church  were  suddenly  converted  to  Mormonism. 
My  belief  is  a  free  conviction,  resulting  from  long 
thought  and  from  such  study  of  historical  and  an- 
thropological evidence  as  I  have  been  able  to  make. 
I  entirely  agree  with  Miss  Key  that  monogamy  was 
made  for  man,  and  not  man  for  monogamy.  I  hold, 
further,  that  monogamy  was  made  by  man,  and  has 
never  at  any  time  been  commanded  or  ratified  by  any 
supernatural  or  superhuman  agency.  I  am  willing, 
also,  to  draw  from  these  principles  their  logical  con- 
clusion —  that  if  any  other  system  than  that  of  lifelong 


ELLEN  KEY  AND  FREE  LOVE  187 

monogamy  could  be  shown  to  meet  better  than  it  the 
physical,  psychic  and  ethical  needs  of  men  and  women, 
and  to  promote  better  than  it  the  health,  sanity  and 
virility  of  the  hmnan  race  throughout  all  time,  then 
monogamy  would  have  to  be  abandoned,  and  that 
other  system  introduced.  But  what  impresses  a  stu- 
dent of  the  world's  experience  in  this  matter  is  this 
simple  fact:  that  all  the  alternative  systems  advocated 
by  our  modern  theorists,  instead  of  being,  as  they  sup- 
pose, new  and  untried,  are  in  fact  old  and  discredited. 
Every  possible  alternative  to  lifelong  monogamy  is 
being  or  has  been  practised,  and  monogamy  has  won 
its  pre-eminence  by  a  protracted  struggle  for  existence 
in  which  it  gained  the  victory  over  all  its  rivals.  This 
is  the  conclusion  which  emerges  from  the  study  of  such 
a  masterly  work  as  Professor  Westermarck's  "History 
of  Human  Marriage." 

'  There  is  one  important  fact,  of  which  we  in  Christen- 
dom are  almost  entirely  oblivious.  It  is  this:  that  in 
times  and  places  where  polygamy  and  polyandry  are 
sanctioned  by  law,  opinion  and  religion,  monogamy  is, 
nevertheless,  widely  practised,  and  tends  to  predomi- 
nate exactly  in  the  proportion  in  which  the  community 
progresses  towards  civilization.^   We  commonly  as- 

*  "  Even  in  Africa,  the  chief  centre  of  polygynous  habits,  polygyny 
is  an  exception. 

"It  is  so  among  all  Mohammedan  peoples,  in  Asia  and  Europe  as 
well  as  in  Africa.  '  In  India,'  says  Syed  Amir  Ali,  'more  than  ninety- 
five  per  cent,  of  Mohammedans  are  at  the  present  moment,  either 
by  conviction  or  necessity,  monogamists.'"  —  Westermarck,  op.  cit., 
p.  439- 


i88  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

sume,  by  an  unconscious  fallacy,  that  in  a  country 
where  polygamy  is  allowed,  everybody  practises  it. 
Apart  from  the  fact  that  Nature  makes  this  impossible, 
through  her  obstinate  persistence  in  producing  men 
and  women  in  approximately  equal  numbers,  it  would 
be  quite  as  reasonable  to  assume  that  in  countries 
where  divorce  is  legalized,  everybody  gets  divorced. 
The  widespread  practice  of  polygamy  or  polyandry, 
however,  is  so  generally  discovered  to  be  a  correlative 
of  degraded  barbarism  as  to  justify  the  assumption 
that  where  we  find  monogamy  increasing  and  tending 
to  dominate  (whether  it  be  ordained  by  law  and  cus- 
tom or  not),  civilization  is  advancing  and  social  sound- 
ness and  virility  are  being  augmented.  Such  a  fact 
constitutes  at  least  a  strong  presumption  in  favour 
of  the  claim  of  monogamy  to  an  even  greater  pre- 
dominance than  it  has  hitherto  enjoyed. 

I  have  spoken  of  the  indissoluble  lifelong  bond  as 
being  the  ideal  of  the  relation  of  the  sexes.  It  is  Miss 
Key's  ideal  also.  She  imagines,  however,  that  this 
relation  cannot  exist  in  its  true  beauty  and  dignity 
except  after  all  external  constraints,  both  of  law  and 
public  opinion,  have  been  removed.  She  holds  that  its 
essence  consists  in  the  voluntary  choice  of  the  parties 
concerned,  and  that  it  is  somehow  degraded  by  being 
legally  safeguarded.  I  hold,  on  the  contrary,  that  there 
is  no  conflict  or  incongruity  between  perfect  law  and 
perfect  freedom,  and  that  men  and  women  cannot 
suffer  in  the  finest  and  most  delicate  aspects  of  their 


ELLEN  KEY  AND  FREE  LOVE  189 

mutual  relations  by  having  their  ideal  expressed  and 
to  some  extent  maintained  by  the  general  will  of  the 
community. 

It  is  necessary,  however,  to  distinguish  clearly  be- 
tween an  absolute  ideal  and  the  extent  to  which  it 
is  justifiable  or  expedient  to  impose  that  ideal  upon 
people  by  law.  The  great  error  of  the  CathoHc  Church 
was  its  omission  to  draw  this  distinction.  It  would 
have  escaped  much  scandal  if  it  had  sought  to  attain 
its  ideal  purpose  by  education  instead  of  coercion. 
The  High  Church  party  in  England  and  America  is 
to-day  imperilling  its  moral  influence  through  falling 
into  the  same  mistake.  I  am  decidedly  of  opinion  that 
in  a  more  enlightened  age  divorce  will  be  as  completely 
obsolete  as  duelling  is  to-day  in  England.  But  I  do 
not  hold  that  such  a  state  of  things  can  or  should  be 
brought  about  by  legal  coercion.  So  far  as  the  law  is 
concerned,  divorce  should  remain  possible.  Certainly 
nobody  can  defend  the  grotesque  injustice  of  the  Eng- 
lish law,  which  deliberately  restricts  divorce  to  the 
rich  and  denies  it  to  the  poor,  and  permits  it  to  the 
man  for  only  one  cause  of  offence,  whereas  a  woman 
cannot  obtain  it  for  less  than  two  causes,  the  second 
of  which  —  cruelty  —  even  in  the  wide  definition  given 
to  it  by  "judge-made  law,"  is  peculiarly  difl&cult  to 
prove.  Nor  can  any'well-wisher  of  society  contemplate 
without  grave  dissatisfaction  the  anarchic  condition 
of  American  law  on  the  subject.  Divorce  is  here 
granted  far  too  freely,  and  for  far  too  many  causes. 


I90  CRITICISMS  OF  LIFE 

Owing,  moreover,  to  the  differing  laws  of  different 
States,  the  absurd  situation  can  and  sometimes  does 
arise,  that  a  man  or  woman  is  legally  married  in  one 
State  and  at  the  same  time  liable  in  another  to  a 
charge  of  bigamy.  The  immediately  necessary  reform 
in  America  is  that  there  should  be  one  uniform  na- 
tional law  of  divorce  throughout  the  Union,  and  that 
such  a  law  should  curtail  the  number  of  grounds  upon 
which  the  marriage  tie  may  be  dissolved.  I  will  not 
attempt  to  formulate  an  exhaustive  category  of  the 
permissible  grounds,  but  the  list  should  not  extend  far 
beyond  the  following:  (i)  Adultery  (with  the  right  of 
remarriage  to  both  parties,  but  with  such  full  publicity 
in  the  matter  of  names  and  facts  that  it  would  be 
impossible  for  the  guilty  party  to  remarry  without 
the  new  wife  or  husband  knowing  the  circumstances) ; 
(2)  incurable  insanity —  the  law  specifying,  however,  in 
rigid  terms,  the  circumstances  which  shall  justify  the 
conclusion  that  the  insanity  is  incurable;  (3)  incurable 
drunkenness  —  subject  to  the  same  stipulation;  (4)  a 
prison  conviction  of  either  party  for  seven  years  or 
more;  (5)  the  sterility  of  the  union  after  five  years, 
provided  both  parties  concur  in  the  demand.  To 
grant  divorce  in  this  last  case  at  the  request  of  only  one 
party  would  involve  the  possibility  of  hideous  injustice 
to  the  other. 

My  reasons  for  opposing  divorce  on  the  ground  of 
"incompatibility  of  temper"  I  shall  have  occasion  to 
state  partially  at  a  later  stage  of  the  argument. 


ELLEN  KEY  AND  FREE  LOVE  191 

But  what,  it  may  be  asked,  becomes  of  the  ideal  of 
lifelong  monogamy  if  the  marriage  bond  is  to  be  legally 
dissoluble  on  so  many  grounds  ?  I  answer  that  the  law 
is  not  the  only  agency  which  may  bring  about  an  ele- 
vation of  social  standards,  and  that  there  are  many 
reforms  which  a  wise  statesmanship  will  seek  to  effect 
by  extra-legal  methods.  No  law  can  be  effectively  en- 
forced unless  its  principles  be  such  as  command  the 
voluntary  and  unconstrained  allegiance  of  the  mass  of 
the  public.  By  passing  measures  which  are  not  in- 
tended to  be  practised,  or  which  public  ignorance  and 
hostility  render  unenforceable,  no  good  is  done,  but 
rather  the  great  harm  of  destroying  men's  respect  for 
law  and  for  the  ideals  it  attempts  to  actualize.  Hence 
arises  the  hard  fact  that  in  Roman  Catholic  countries 
there  is  just  as  much  of  the  thing  divorce  (under  other 
names)  as  among  Protestant  nations,  and  laxity  of  sex- 
ual life  is  notoriously  not  less  prevalent  among  Catho- 
lic peoples  than  elsewhere.  On  the  other  hand,  a  general 
rise  in  the  level  of  public  opinion,  and  the  consequent 
widening  of  the*  range  of  its  censures,  will  frequently 
produce  reform  so  rapidly  and  effectually  as  to  render 
legislation  superfluous. 

An  interesting  illustration  is  afforded  by  the  analo- 
gous case  of  excessive  drinking.  A  hundred  years  ago 
in  England,  it  was  consistent  with  the  canons  of  good 
taste  and  social  propriety  for  the  gentlemen  at  a  din- 
ner-party to  finish  the  evening  under  the  table.  Even 
among  members  of  the  clerical  profession  the  standard 


192  CRITICISMS  OF  LIFE 

was  scarcely  higher  than  for  the  laity,  and  many  un- 
edifying  anecdotes  are  preserved  of  the  "two-bottle 
orthodox."  To-day,  such  conduct  would  result  in 
social  ostracism  for  any  man,  no  matter  how  exalted 
his  station  in  life,  who  dared  to  practise  it.  Yet  in  the 
promotion  of  this  immense  reform,  legislation  has  had 
no  share.  So  far  as  the  law  is  concerned,  a  man  is  still 
free  to  get  drunk  every  night  in  the  week.  The  ame- 
lioration has  been  effected  entirely  by  public  opinion, 
which  has  changed  in  response  to  the  growth  of  know- 
ledge and  the  deepening  of  refinement.  The  vinous 
Pickwickians  and  Wardles,  whom  Dickens  was  able 
to  portray  as  entirely  acceptable  members  of  society, 
would  not  to-day  be  tolerated  anywhere  save  in  the 
most  degraded  substratum  of  the  populace,  and  even 
here  they  would  be  constantly  censured  for  conduct 
which  good  society  a  hundred  years  ago  accepted  as 
a  matter  of  course. 

My  hope  and  faith  is  that  divorce  will  be  got  rid 
of  by  a  strictly  analogous  process.  While  it  remains 
legally  possible,  it  will  be  rendered  socially  impossible, 
by  reason  of  a  growth  of  knowledge  and  foresight 
which  will  make  the  blunders  that  to-day  lead  to 
divorce  inexcusable  except  in  the  very  rarest  cases. 
Our  scientific  knowledge  of  the  facts  relating  to  the 
imion  of  the  sexes  is  to-day  greater  than  ever  before, 
and  is  constantly  increasing.  We  know,  with  almost 
quantitative  exactness,  the  conditions  under  which 
certain  diseases  reappear  in  successive  generations. 


ELLEN  KEY  AND  FREE  LOVE  193 

Where  quantitative  knowledge  fails,  we  know  approxi- 
mately the  dangers  to  be  apprehended  from  the  mating 
of  persons  among  whose  ancestry  certain  defects  have 
appeared.  We  know,  moreover,  that  the  old  assertion, 
"a  reformed  rake  makes  the  best  husband,"  is  a  hide- 
ously dangerous  falsehood.  This  growing  knowledge  is 
being  thrown  into  forms  in  which  it  can  safely  be  im- 
parted to  young  people  of  both  sexes,  so  early  in  life 
that  it  cannot  fail  to  influence  even  those  non-rational 
impulses  which  awaken  as  maturity  is  approached. 

The  effect  of  such  education  will  be  not  so  much  to 
provoke  a  painful  clash  between  reason  and  inclina- 
tion, as  to  prevent  inclination  itself  from  taking  a 
dangerous  direction.  We  grossly  imderestimate  the 
extent  to  which  the  so-called  blind  impulses  of  human 
nature  can  be  guided  and  controlled  by  ideational 
forces.  We  forget  the  plain  and  obvious  fact  that  these 
impulses  hardly  ever  canalize  themselves  except  in 
directions  generally  sanctioned  by  public  opinion.  For 
example,  as  Sir  Francis  Galton  pointed  out  in  his  first 
plea  for  eugenics,  there  is  never  any  difficulty  among 
primitive  communities  in  maintaining  the  most  rig- 
orous tribal  laws  regarding  marriage.  Members  of 
exogamous  conmiunities  seldom  fall  in  love  with  per- 
sons of  their  own  kindred  or  totem;  people  in  endogam- 
ous  tribes  rarely  feel  any  disposition  to  marry  outside 
the  limits  of  their  own  conmiunity.  Among  ourselves, 
even,  it  is  noteworthy  that  the  sexual  impulse  almost 
invariably  follows  the  lines  laid  down  by  convention 


194  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

and  social  expectation.  A  workingman  almost  never 
falls  in  love  with  a  woman  of  the  so-called  upper  class. 
A  rich  man  hardly  ever  feels  impelled  to  marry  a 
woman  of  the  people.  When  a  "lady,"  technically  so- 
called,  marries  her  butler  or  elopes  with  her  chauffeur, 
the  most  democratic  onlooker  finds  himself  (or  more 
frequently  herself)  adjudging  her  to  be  mad  —  thereby 
imconsciously  testifying  that  the  sexual  impulse  not 
only  normally  is  but  ought  to  be  canalized  within  rigid 
limits  of  educational  and  general  cultural  similarity, 
these  being  the  necessary  conditions  of  permanent 
mutual  congeniality  and  common  interest. 

There  is,  of  course,  the  ghastly  fact  of  prostitution, 
involving  a  great  deal  of  illicit  intercourse  between 
men  of  the  wealthy  class  and  outcast  women;  but 
nobody  would  confuse  this  with  the  discriminating 
selection  and  individualized  affection  which  leads  to 
marriage.  The  impulse  which  seeks  its  satisfaction  in 
the  brothel  is  the  merely  animal  one,  which  has  no 
relation  to  the  individuality  of  its  object. 

These  considerations  suffice  to  show  how  compara- 
tively easy  it  will  be,  by  means  of  judiciously  forewarn- 
ing and  forearming  the  young  man  and  the  maiden,  to 
avert  those  tragic  blunders  which  to-day  are  rectified, 
hardly  less  tragically,  in  the  divorce  court.  Statute  law 
need  not  necessarily  have  any  part  in  the  process. 
When  once  the  teaching,  called  to-day  by  the  impleas- 
ant  and  unsatisfactory  name  of  "sex  hygiene,"  is 
given  as  it  should  be  given,  —  that  is,  by  parents,  or, 


ELLEN  KEY  AND  FREE  LOVE  195 

failing  them,  by  teachers  who  impart  to  the  lessons  the 
spirit  of  awe  and  reverence  which  we  associate  with 
religion,  —  we  may  be  certain  that  there  will  be  cre- 
ated in  the  young  such  a  wise  alertness  to  secure  their 
own  lifelong  well-being,  and  to  promote  the  sanity,  effi- 
ciency and  virility  of  the  future  race,  that  the  number 
of  tragic  failures  resulting  in  divorce  will  be  reduced 
almost  to  the  vanishing-point.  And  when  it  has  be- 
come practically  inexcusable  for  people  to  marry  with- 
out sufficient  knowledge  of  one  another,  and  of  the 
probable  consequences  of  a  given  union  to  themselves 
and  to  their  offspring,  it  will  be  perfectly  just  for 
society  to  visit  upon  divorcees,  of  both  sexes,  the  same 
heavy  censures  and  penalties  that  it  visits  to-day  upon 
the  drunkard. 

Let  us  now  turn,  however,  to  the  indictment  against 
marriage  brought  by  Miss  Key.  I  have  quoted  above 
the  summary  of  her  case  against  it  from  page  290  of 
"Love  and  Marriage."  As  we  have  seen,  she  holds 
marriage  itself  responsible  for  "the  coarsest  sexual 
habits,  the  most  shameless  traffic,  the  most  agonising 
soul-murders,  the  most  inhuman  cruelties,  and  the 
grossest  infringements  of  liberty  that  any  department 
of  modern  life  can  show."  These  and  other  horrors,  be 
it  observed,  she  declares  that  marriage  has  producedj 
and  is  still  producing.-  Here,  however,  she  overlooks 
a  discrimination  which  is  absolutely  essential  to  all 
intelligent  sociological  thinking.  She  argues  in  terms 


196  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

of  the  ancient  fallacy  of  post  hoc  ergo  propter  hoc. 
These  disgusting  circumstances  arise  after  marriage, 
and  Miss  Key  at  once  infers  that  they  arise  because 
of  marriage.  Such  a  process  of  reasoning  is  at  once 
refuted  by  the  fact  that  in  the  majority  of  marriages 
these  things  never  happen  at  all.  They  cannot,  there- 
fore, be  necessary  results  of  marriage,  else  they  would 
arise  in  every  case.  There  must  be  some  defect  of 
character  or  circumstance  in  the  persons  to  whom 
they  do  happen. 

If  fifty  men,  for  example,  are  exposed  to  the  midday 
sun,  and  two  of  them  get  sunstroke,  it  would  obviously 
not  be  true  to  say  that  the  sun's  heat  was  a  neces- 
sary and  inevitable  cause  of  sunstroke.  If  it  were,  how 
could  the  forty-eight  escape  ?  It  must  be  evident  that 
the  simstroke  is  caused  by  the  conjuncture  between 
some  weakening  predisposition  in  the  victims  and  the 
rays  to  which  they  are  exposed.  If  that  weakness 
could  have  been  remedied  beforehand,  their  exposure 
to  the  sim  would  not  have  resulted  in  their  disease. 

It  is  a  sound  general  rule  that  no  hiunan  institution 
is  to  be  blamed  for  evils  associated  with  it,  unless  it 
can  be  demonstrated  that  the  institution  is  itself  the 
cause  of  the  evils,  and  therefore  that  its  abolition 
would  be  their  cure.  For  example,  in  this  coimtry  the 
republican  form  of  government  has  been,  and  still  is, 
associated  with  every  description  of  vile  and  humiliat- 
ing poHtical  corruption.  Under  it,  ofl&ces  have  been 
bought  and  sold,  public  servants  have  shamelessly 


ELLEN  KEY  AND  FREE  LOVE  197 

subordinated  their  patriotism  to  their  pocket-books, 
and  made  the  pretence  of  working  for  the  common 
weal  a  mere  mask  for  dishonest  self-aggrandizement. 
Tenth-rate  instead  of  first-rate  men  have  been  at- 
tracted to  the  public  service,  and  it  is  still  notoriously 
exceptional  to  find  a  politician  who  is  also  a  gentleman. 
Indeed,  the  very  title  "politician''  in  America  (alone 
among  English-speaking  nations)  is  almost  equivalent 
to  an  insult;  and  to  say  of  any  piece  of  public  work 
that  "there  is  too  much  politics  in  it,"  is  synonymous 
with  saying  that  it  has  been  exploited  by  dishonest 
persons  for  selfish  ends. 

Now,  these  faults  have  been  seized  upon  by  some 
European  advocates  of  aristocracy  or  despotism  as 
furnishing  a  conclusive  condemnation  of  democracy. 
But  in  America,  so  far  as  I  am  aware,  nobody  has  ever 
been  foolish  enough  to  suppose  that  these  incidental 
vices  of  the  political  system  are  due  to  the  fact  that  the 
United  States  is  a  republic,  or  that  they  could  be  ex- 
tirpated by  changing  to  a  monarchical  or  aristocratic 
form  of  government.  Everybody  here  is  aware  that  the 
faults  are  not  inherent  in  democracy,  but  only  ad- 
herent to  it.  They  arise  from  defects  of  character  and 
low  moral  standards  in  the  professional  political  class, 
and  they  will  certainly  be  got  rid  of  the  moment  the 
people  in  general  cease  to  be  obsessed  by  that  mad 
craze  for  personal  enrichment  which  makes  them 
neglect  their  public  responsibilities.  Already  there 
has  been  marked  improvement,  and  the  spread  of 


198  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

woman  suffrage  is  advancing  that  improvement  with 
tremendous  speed. 

The  same  reasoning  which  distinguishes  between 
corruption  as  an  incident  of  democracy,  and  demo- 
cracy as  a  cause  of  corruption,  ought  also  to  be  ap- 
plied to  marriage,  and  indeed  to  every  field  of  human 
interest.  If  in  any  given  case  it  can  be  shown  that 
admitted  evils  can  be  cured  without  abolishing  the 
institution  they  contaminate,  or,  conversely,  that  the 
abolition  of  that  institution  would  still  leave  the  evils 
unremedied,  then  the  institution  itself  is  clearly  not  to 
blame.  Now,  even  Mr.  Shaw  has  discovered  (through 
studying  Brieux's  play  "Les  Hannetons")  that  the 
evils  he  complains  of  in  marriage  can  be  developed  in  a 
tenfold  worse  form  in  ilHcit  unions.  Where  a  passion- 
ately jealous  man  or  woman  desires  to  monopolize  the 
affections  and  attentions  of  a  partner  whose  fidelity  is 
secured  by  no  legal  tie,  their  relations  become  a  source 
of  mutual  exasperation  more  heUish  than  any  other 
human  connection.  The  consciousness  that  there  is 
no  law  or  pubhc  opinion  to  sanction  and  uphold  their 
fiercely  asserted  claim  exacerbates  the  jealousy  which 
arises  from  the  lust  of  possession;  and  such  degrading 
horrors  could  only  be  multipUed  by  setting  people 
"free,"  as  Miss  Key's  proposals  would  necessarily  do, 
to  enslave  themselves  anew  upon  every  vagrant  whim. 

In  short,  the  tacit  assumption  running  throughout 
"Love  and  Marriage,"  and  most  other  books  of  its 
kind,  is  not  merely  that  marriage  is  the  cause  of  the 


ELLEN  KEY  AND  FREE  LOVE     199 

evils  complained  of,  but  that  its  abolition  would  be 
their  cure;  and  this  assumption  is  flatly  contradicted 
by  facts  of  experience  within  the  knowledge  of  every- 
body. 

A  second  presupposition  of  Miss  Key's  book  is  one 
that  one  feels  a  certain  difficulty  in  criticizing.  The 
difficulty  arises  from  the  fact  that  she  merely  states, 
without  troubling  to  prove  or  defend,  a  position  which 
to  her  is  clearly  self-evident,  but  which  to  her  readers 
sounds  like  a  frantic  absurdity.  This  position  —  so 
obvious,  apparently,  to  Miss  Key  —  is  that  love  and 
marriage  are  antithetical  and  mutually  exclusive;  that 
is  to  say,  she  holds  that  where  there  is  marriage  there 
cannot  be  love,  and  where  there  is  love  there  cannot  be 
marriage.  She  expresses  this  position  in  the  following 
words:  — 

The  import  of  the  moral  controversies  which  now  arise 
with  increasing  frequency  is  the  examination  of  the  rela- 
tively higher  value  for  real  sexual  morality  of  marriage  or 
love} 

I  hasten  to  explain  that  the  italics  are  Miss  Key's.  I 
could  not  myself  hit  upon  any  typographical  device 
emphatic  enough  to  express  the  overwhelming  aston- 
ishment which  her  words  create  in  my  mind.  If  she 
means  what  she  says,  I  am  merely  bewildered;  if  she 
means  something  else,  I  confess  myself  unable  to  di- 
vine what  it  can  be.  Here  is  an  antithesis  which  has  no 
shadow  of  a  fact  in  heaven  or  earth  to  justify  it.  One 
1  Love  and  Marriage,  p.  ii. 


200  CRITICISMS   OF   LIFE 

might  as  well  discuss  "the  relatively  higher  value  for 
morality"  of  houses  or  domestic  edifices,  or  the  merits 
of  bomiets  as  contrasted  with  coverings  for  the  head. 
Yet  this  is  no  mere  slip  of  expression  on  ^Miss  Key's 
part.  The  antithesis  she  here  sets  up  is  presupposed 
throughout  the  entire  course  of  her  argument;  so  much 
so  that  the  book  might  just  as  well  be  called  "Love  or 
Marriage"  as  "Love  and  Marriage."  She  is  seriously 
con\^ced  that  these  two  things  cannot  coexist.  She 
has  somehow  succeeded  in  overlooking  the  monu- 
mental fact  that  in  most  cases  they  are  synonymous. 
She  really  does  not  know  that  most  people  get  mar- 
ried because  they  love  each  other,  and  then  obstinately 
go  on  loving  each  other,  in  spite  even  of  the  fact  that 
they  are  married.  She  is  not  aware  that  this  is  a  rule 
so  universal  that  the  only  exceptions  to  it  are  degen- 
erates or  grown-up  spoiled  children. 

If  —  to  hazard  a  wild  conjecture  —  if  Miss  Key 
really  means  that  the  issue  is  between  so-called  free 
love  and  marriage,  this  would  only  demonstrate  how 
inveterately  she  thinks  of  marriage  as  consisting 
merely  in  the  external  legal  bond.  As  a  matter  of  fact, 
however,  her  own  ideal  of  free  love  —  that  is,  a  con- 
nection which,  though  untrammelled,  is  to  remain 
lifelong  and  exclusive  —  is  itself  the  very  definition  of 
marriage,  which  is  constituted  between  the  two  per- 
sons by  their  own  free  and  final  selection  of  each  other, 
and  is  not  created,  but  only  ratified,  by  the  ci\il  or 
ecclesiastical  ceremony.  She  can  scarcely  mean  that 


ELLEN  KEY  AND  FREE  LOVE  201 

children  born  in  wedlock,  but  not  "of  love,"  are  in- 
ferior to  children  born  of  a  passionate  love,  whether 
within  marriage  or  without;  for  she  admits^  that  we 
have  no  data  which  could  give  any  scientific  warrant 
to  the  popular  assumption  to  this  effect. 

The  next  error  which  we  discover  in  Miss  Key's 
argument  discloses  that  blindness  to  moral  distinctions 
of  which  I  have  ventured  to  accuse  her.  It  is,  briefly, 
the  notion  that  things  immoral  in  themselves  can  be 
made  moral  by  legal  sanction,  and  that  the  ethical 
quality  of  a  given  form  of  conduct  can  be  changed  by 
changing  its  name.  This  is  a  serious  criticism,  and  yet 
I  cannot  but  feel  that  her  book  fully  justifies  it.  I  will 
submit  two  instances  of  the  deficiency  to  the  reader's 
judgment. 

On  page  in  she  writes  : — 

^  ...  Free  love  among  the  upper  class  —  as  among  the 
lower  class  —  will,  it  is  true,  contribute  to  the  abolition 
of  prostitution,  but  not  to  the  exaltation  of  mankind 
through  a  greater  love,  a  higher  morality. 

Free  love  will  contribute  to  the  abolition  of  prostitution. 
Undoubtedly  it  will  contribute  to  the  abolition  of  the 
word,  and  this  will  satisfy  many;  for,  as  Pascal  says, 
"Le  monde  se  paie  de  mots,  peu  approfondissent  les 
choses."  Or,  to  put  it  in  a  phrase  more  generally 
familiar,  "Man  does  not  live  by  bread  alone,  but 
principally  by  catch- words."  But  for  one  who  pierces 
through  words  to  facts,  it  is  difficult  to  see  how  the 

*  Love  and  Marriage,  p.  i66. 


202  CRITICISMS  OF  LIFE 

abolition  of  prostitution  can  be  effected  by  calling  the 
same  thing  something  else.  What  are  the  distinguish- 
ing marks  of  prostitution,  if  not  cohabitation  regard- 
less of  duty,  terminable  at  pleasure,  and  transferable 
at  will  ?  I  shall,  of  course,  be  told  that  the  essence  of 
prostitution  is  the  fact  that  indulgence  is  bought  and 
sold  —  that  the  outcast  woman  does  this  thing  merely 
for  money.  I  admit  that  the  correction  is  warranted  by 
some  of  the  present-day  facts.  Yet  if,  as  eminent  med- 
ical and  other  scientific  authorities  are  now  telling  us, 
there  are  many  women  who  take  to  this  life  not  from 
unqualified  pecuniary  need,  but  from  preference,  then 
the  discrimination  cannot  be  maintained,  in  view  of 
the  fact  that  such  women  are  by  universal  consent 
classed  as  prostitutes.  It  is,  moreover,  as  we  have 
seen,  a  part  of  Miss  Key's  argument  that  the  woman 
who  practises  free  love  is,  when  she  becomes  a  mother, 
to  receive  monetary  support  from  the  community, 
both  for  herself  and  for  her  child.  I  cannot,  then,  con- 
clude otherwise  than  that  Miss  Key  does  here  display 
the  lack  of  moral  discrimination  which  I  have  ven- 
tured to  charge  against  her.  She  does  seriously  propose 
to  abolish  this  horrible  evil  by  giving  it  legal  sanction 
under  a  fresh  name.  In  so  far  as  the  causation  of 
prostitution  is  economic,  there  is,  of  course,  no  evi- 
dence that  "free  love"  can  even  contribute  towards 
its  abolition. 

It  is  indeed  true  that  the  whole  of  society  to-day 
shows  a  moral  blindness  to  the  facts  regarding  prosti- 


ELLEN  KEY  AND  FREE  LOVE     aoj 

tution  far  more  serious  than  Miss  Key's.  Wrath  and 
contempt  are  visited  exclusively  upon  the  outcast 
class  of  women,  and  the  men  whose  patronage  is 
responsible  for  their  position  go  practically  imscathed 
by  public  condemnation.  The  fact  that  every  so- 
called  fallen  woman  represents  an  indefinite  number  of 
men,  who  equally  deserve  the  epithet  "fallen,"  is  sel- 
dom taken  into  consideration.  The  first  step  towards 
a  true  moral  estimate  of  the  situation  must  consist  in 
seeing  and  saying  clearly  that  society  ought  to  take 
exactly  the  same  attitude  towards  the  fallen  man  that 
it  takes  towards  the  fallen  woman.  By  this  I  mean,  to 
put  it  in  plain  language,  that  if  society  ostracizes  her  it 
should  ostracize  him.  If  society  invites  him  to  dinner, 
it  should  invite  her.  If  society  is  willing  to  marry  its 
daughters  to  him,  it  should  be  equally  willing  —  like 
Gilbey  in  "Fanny's  First  Play"  —  to  marry  its  sons 
to  her. 

The  second  instance  of  defective  moral  vision  is 
analogous  to  the  first.  At  the  commencement  of  her 
chapter  on  "Free  Divorce,"  Miss  Key  speaks  of  "the 
desire  of  the  present  day  to  abolish  adultery  by  means 
of  free  divorce."  With  this  desire  she  clearly  sympa- 
thizes and  thinks  it  possible  to  comply.  She  proceeds 
to  explain  how,  in  her  judgment,  it  should  be  met :  — 

The  true  line  of  development  will  quite  certainly  be 
this:  that  divorce  will  be  free,  depending  solely  upon  the 
will  of  both  parties  or  of  one,  maintained  for  a  certain 
time. 


204  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

She  also,  in  the  name  of  the  new  morality,  questions 
whether  all  adulterers 

in  their  innermost  consciousness,  really  feel  themselves 
to  be  sinners.  The  need  which  impelled  them  was  per- 
haps so  imperious  that  it  justified  them  before  their  own 
conscience  in  choosing  a  lesser  evil  in  preference  to  a 
greater. 

Here  it  is  best  to  express  one's  dissent  in  plain  lan- 
guage, by  stating  that,  if  Miss  Key's  proposal  were 
adopted,  the  only  thing  that  would  be  abolished  would 
be  the  word  "adultery.''  The  thing  would  remain,  and 
would  be  ethically  exactly  what  it  is  to-day.  The 
idea  that  a  statute  can  turn  immorality  into  morality, 
or  that  the  heinousness  of  a  sin  lies  in  its  name,  and 
can  be  eradicated  by  rebaptizing  it,  is  one  of  those 
fundamental  and  widespread  moral  blindnesses  which 
sometimes  tempt  one  to  despair  of  the  spiritual  ad- 
vance of  hmnanity.  It  is  exactly  as  if  men  should  be 
distressed  by  the  prevalence  of  theft  in  our  time,  and 
should  seriously  propose  to  rid  society  of  it  by  calling 
stealing  business,  and  the  thief  a  financier.  This,  of 
course,  is  what  we  very  often  do;  but  in  connection 
with  property,  though  our  moral  insight  may  be  dim, 
our  sense  of  humour  enables  us  to  see  through  the 
verbal  jugglery. 

Consider,  for  example,  the  instance  that  I  cited  at 
the  outset,  of  a  man  who  divorced  his  wife,  united 
himself  to  a  new  partner,  divorced  her  in  turn,  and 
returned  to  his  wife.  That  man  certainly  got  a  certi- 


ELLEN  KEY  AND  FREE  LOVE    205 

ficate  from  some  official  of  the  law  to  sanction  each  of 
the  steps  he  took.  My  contention,  however,  is  that  this 
precaution  on  his  part  did  not  lessen,  by  any  jot  or 
tittle,  the  immoraUty  of  his  conduct.  Unless  the  grounds 
for  a  divorce  are  ethically  satisfying,  altogether  apart  from 
their  legality,  the  divorce  is  a  crime,  no  matter  how 
many  statutes  sanction  it;  and  the  subsequent  union 
cannot  be  made  other  than  adulterous  by  all  the 
priests  or  magistrates  in  Christendom.  Judging  the 
case,  therefore,  upon  its  facts,  I  do  not  hesitate  to  de- 
clare that  there  was  no  moral  difference  between  the 
conduct  of  this  rich  man  and  the  practice  of  those  men 
in  the  working  class  who  desert  and  betray  their  wives, 
and  afterwards  return  to  them,  without  seeking  to 
narcotize  their  consciences  or  hoodwink  their  neigh- 
bours by  means  of  a  legal  sanction.  I  do  not  deny  that, 
in  some  cases,  conduct,  otherwise  moral  in  itself,  may 
become  immoral  if  practised  in  defiance  of  a  statute 
law.  This  is  a  large  question,  upon  which  I  need  not 
here  enter.  But  conduct  immoral  in  itself  can  never 
become  moral  through  being  legalized. 

We  turn  now  to  another,  and  a  still  more  radical 
error  of  Miss  Key  and  her  school,  —  an  error  born  of 
that  anarchistic  and  atomistic  individuaHsm  which  is 
the  real  creed  of  many  who  imagine  themselves  Social- 
ists. It  is  the  idea,  perpetually  assumed  and  frequently 
stated  in  overt  terms  throughout  this  book  of  Ellen 
Key's,  that  happiness  or  unhappiness  in  marriage  is  a 
mere  blind  fatality  and  finality,  entirely  imrelated  to, 


2o6  CRITICISMS  OF  LIFE 

and  independent  of,  the  will  of  the  parties  concerned. 
She  argues  as  though  love  were  a  thing  like  measles, 
which  you  catch  through  sheer  bad  luck,  and  often 
through  no  carelessness  of  your  own,  and  which  may 
presently  pass  away,  either  through  or  in  spite  of  the 
efforts  of  the  doctor.  The  moment  the  disease  is  gone, 
you  are  to  be  free  to  snap  any  connection  which  you 
have  formed  while  under  its  influence.  This  is  the  great 
new  morality  of  love  versus  marriage,  —  a  new  mo- 
rality which  in  Miss  Key's  mind  is  entirely  distinct 
from  the  old  immorality,  though  probably  few  others 
will  be  able  to  fathom  the  distinction.  She  expresses 
herself  in  these  unmistakable  terms:  — 

As  soon  as  love  is  admitted  as  the  moral  ground  of 
marriage,  it  will  be  a  necessary  consequence  that  he  who 
has  ceased  to  love,  should  be  allowed  a  moral  as  well  as  a 
legal  right  to  withdraw  from  his  marriage,  if  he  chooses 
to  avail  himself  of  this  right.  ^ 

Notice,  incidentally,  how  Miss  Key's  queer  notion 
of  morality  peeps  out  through  this  statement.  A  man 
is  to  be  allowed  a  moral  right.  That  is  to  say,  a  moral 
right  is  a  mere  convention,  and,  as  such,  can  be  given 
or  withheld  by  society.  To  those  of  us  who  hold  that 
moral  distinctions  are  embedded  in  the  nature  of 
things,  in  such  wise  that  they  can  neither  be  created 
nor  destroyed  by  any  authority,  the  idea  naturally 
seems  fantastic.  A  man  may,  indeed,  be  permitted  or 
denied  the  exercise  of  a  moral  right,  but,  as  regards  the 
*  Love  and  Marriage,  pp.  290-91. 


ELLEN  KEY  AND  FREE  LOVE  207 

right  itself,  he  either  has  it  or  has  it  not,  and  it  can 
neither  be  given  to  nor  taken  from  him. 

But  the  radical  error,  illustrated  in  the  t3rpical  sen- 
tence which  I  have  just  quoted,  goes  far  deeper  than 
this.  It  is  the  error  involved  in  the  whole  modern 
practice  of  divorce  for  so-called  "incompatibility  of 
temper."  It  is  the  notion  that  a  man's  or  a  woman's 
own  will  and  character  have  no  part  in  determining  the 
happiness  or  the  imhappiness  of  a  union.  We  take  it 
for  granted  that,  when  a  marriage  is  uncongenial,  the 
parties  merely  find  it  so;  we  do  not  entertain,  even 
in  order  to  reject  it,  the  idea  that  they  may  possibly 
have  made  their  imion  unsatisfactory  to  themselves, 
or  that  any  self -discipline  on  their  part  could  make  it 
satisfactory. 

In  this  connection  I  may  deal  with  the  objection, 
which  must  have  arisen  in  the  minds  of  some  readers, 
that  *' incompatibility  of  temper"  did  not  figure  in  my 
list  of  causes  for  which  divorce  should  be  allowed.  I 
reserved  my  criticism  on  this  head  because  I  wished  to 
deal  with  it  where  it  logically  arises  in  the  considera- 
tion of  Miss  Key's  argument.  I  am  opposed  to  divorce 
on  this  ground  for  two  reasons :  first,  because  if  people's 
tempers  are  really  so  incompatible  as  to  make  their 
lifelong  companionship  intolerable,  they  can,  and 
therefore  ought  to,  know  this  in  time  to  prevent  their 
imion.  And,  secondly,  because  such  incompatibility 
as  can  remain  entirely  concealed  before  marriage,  can- 
not possibly  be  so  great  but  that  it  may  be  overcome 


2o8  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

and  harmonized  after  marriage,  by  means  of  proper 
self -discipline  and  true  grasp  of  the  idea  of  duty. 

It  is  noteworthy  that  we  never  think  of  admitting 
the  principle  involved  in  divorce  for  incompatibility 
in  any  other  of  the  relations  of  life.  No  soldier  would 
be  pardoned  for  deserting  from  the  army  on  the 
ground  that  he  found  his  temper  hopelessly  incom- 
patible with  that  of  his  comrades  and  his  oflScers.  No 
party  to  a  business  contract  would  be  absolved  from 
observing  its  terms  upon  any  such  consideration. 
These  analogies  are  indeed  inadequate,  but  only  be- 
cause marriage  is  so  overwhelmingly  important  that 
no  other  human  relation  is  comparable  to  it  in  signi- 
ficance. Yet  no  other  connection  in  life,  except  the  one 
inexpressibly  significant  and  important  one,  is  man- 
kind willing  to  sunder  on  such  a  ground  1  Indeed,  even 
in  the  case  of  blood  relations,  we  seldom  or  never  hear 
of  people  repudiating  one  another,  coram  populo,  for 
any  such  reason.  Parents  and  children,  brothers  and 
sisters,  may  have  their  family  quarrels,  and  may  sepa- 
rate temporarily  —  a  course  which  is  frequently  wise 
and  necessary  also  in  the  case  of  married  people.  But 
they  are  hardly  ever  foolish  enough  to  declare  that  the 
differences  of  taste,  interest  and  inclination  between 
them  are  so  great  that  they  will  never  meet  again 
or  suffer  society  to  recognize  their  relatedness;  and 
when  they  do  so,  we  can  almost  always  see  that  —  as 
in  Schopenhauer's  case  —  it  is  their  own  preventable 
perversity  which  is  responsible. 


ELLEN  KEY  AND  FREE  LOVE  209 

This  notion,  that  he  or  she  who  has  ceased  to  love 
must  be  given  a  moral  and  legal  right  to  withdraw  from 
marriage,  is  a  notion  which  simply  denies  the  existence 
of  duty,  except  in  the  narrowest  self-regarding  sense 
of  the  term  —  Miss  Key's  wonderful  sense,  in  which 
"real  selfishness  ...  is  one  with  real  morality."  ^  The 
modem  free-lover  is  unwilling  to  admit  that  the  claim 
of  duty  can  pass  beyond  the  mere  conscious  self- 
direction  of  the  individual.  He  thinks  that,  whether 
a  man  is  truly  aware  or  not  of  those  real  organic  needs 
of  his  personal  and  social  nature  which  give  content 
to  the  imperative  of  conscience,  he  is,  nevertheless,  to 
submit  to  no  guidance  or  command  from  outside  au- 
thorities, even  though  they  know  more  truly  than  he 
what  is  really  necessary  for  him  and  for  the  common 
life.  This  is  a  doctrine  which  would  leave  a  conscien- 
tious burglar  to  his  own  devices,  and  prohibit,  as  im- 
warrantable  tyranny,  any  interference  by  society  with 
a  sweating  employer  of  child  labour,  or  with  the  patrons 
of  gambling  dens.  If,  in  the  one  department  of  a  man's 
conduct  which  is  fraught  with  the  most  serious  im- 
port to  society,  he  is  to  be  wholly  imamenable  to  law  or 
public  opinion,  —  if  here  the  needs  of  the  community 
give  it  no  right  to  interfere, — how  can  any  lesser  social 
exigency  be  held  to  warrant  either  compulsion  or 
restraint  ? 

Those,  however,  who  take  the  view  that  duty  is 
something  more  than  what  a  man  consciously  wants  to 
1  Love  and  Marriage,  p.  126. 


2IO  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

do,  and  is  indeed  the  sovereign  and  unconditional  law 
of  nature  and  reason,  will  have  a  clue  guiding  them  to 
the  exposure  not  only  of  the  fallacy  which  we  have  just 
laid  open,  but  of  several  other  errors  of  the  free-love 
school.  One  of  these  is  the  notion,  always  implied 
and  frequently  affirmed  in  their  arguments,  although 
sometimes  verbally  contradicted,  that  marriage  is 
wholly  or  mainly  a  means  to  the  individual  happiness 
of  those  who  enter  upon  it.  Miss  Key,  of  course,  con- 
tends repeatedly  that  much  more  than  this  is  in- 
volved; she  contradicts  herself,  however,  by  claiming 
again  and  again  that  a  marriage  may  be  dissolved  if  it 
fails  to  secure  this.  Upon  what  other  principle,  in- 
deed, could  one  justify  divorce  at  the  request  of  either 
party  to  a  marriage,  without  inquisition  into  the  rea- 
sons for  the  demand  ?  The  plain  fact  is  that  individual 
happiness  cannot  be  either  guaranteed  or  maintained 
by  any  human  arrangement  whatever.  The  securing 
of  personal  happiness,  moreover,  is'  not  the  true  end 
of  life;  indeed,  the  claim  of  duty  frequently  begins  to 
assert  itself  only  when  happiness  is  irretrievably  lost. 
He  who  enjoys  happiness  is  getting  not  what  he  de- 
serves, but  an  uncovenanted  bonus  added  to  the  div- 
idend of  life.  He  or  she  who  makes  the  pursuit  of 
happiness  the  dominant  end  of  existence,  is  chasing  a 
will-o'-the-wisp.  The  true  end  of  life  for  the  individual 
is  perfection  of  character.  This  is  attainable  only  in' 
and  through  the  service  of  [all,  and  the  subordination  of 
self-centred  desire  to  the  claims  of  that  higher  selfhood, 


ELLEN  KEY  AND  FREE  LOVE    211 

which  is  co-extensive  and  identical  with  the  universal 
human  trend  towards  the  actualization  of  the  moral 
ideal. 

The  right  to  renounce  marriage  because  of  unhap- 
piness  would  logically  involve  the  right  to  commit 
suicide  for  the  same  reason.  He  who  thinks  his  claim 
to  happiness  so  imchallengeable  that  he  feels  free  to 
renounce  wife  and  child  in  order  to  secure  it,  would 
surely  also  plead  a  right  to  cast  away  his  own  life,  and 
his  allegiance  to  the  general  life,  for  the  same  cause. 
This  logical  extension  of  the  doctrine  displays  its 
monstrousness.  Who  are  we  that  we  should  repudiate 
the  universe  because  it  will  not  devote  itself  to  securing 
our  petty  pleasures  and  happinesses  ? 

Akin  to  this  is  a  still  further  ethical  blunder,  in- 
volved in  the  perpetual  reiteration  throughout  Miss 
Key's  book  of  the  word  "right."  We  are  for  ever  hear- 
ing of  the  right  to  marriage,  the  right  to  divorce,  the 
right  to  motherhood.  The  whole  theory  involves  a 
looking  at  life  through  the  wrong  end  of  the  telescope. 
We  human  beings  have  only  such  rights  as  are  involved 
in  and  deducible  from  our  duties.  Debtors  as  we  are 
to  the  world  for  more  than  we  ever  can  repay,  our  only 
rights  are  those  conditions  necessary  for  the  discharge, 
to  the  utmost  of  our  powers,  of  the  inexhaustible  claims 
of  humanity  upon  us.  And  marriage,  like  every  other 
great  social  ordinance,  is  instituted  not  primarily  to 
secure  our  happiness,  but  to  enable  us  to  discharge  our 
duty,  in  the  matter  of  the  perpetuation  and  spiritual 


212  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

development  of  the  human  species,  with  the  possible 
maximum  of  racial  efficiency.  Happily,  it  also  secures 
incidentally  the  possible  maximimi  of  personal  satis- 
faction in  well-doing;  but  inasmuch  as  this  is  not  its 
first  or  most  important  function,  it  is  not  to  be  con- 
demned when  it  fails  to  secure  this,  provided  it  does 
attain  its  primal  and  paramount  ends. 

From  this  standpoint,  I  contend  that  every  one  of 
the  evils  complained  of  in  marriage  by  Miss  Ellen  Key 
is  demonstrably  due  not  to  marriage  as  an  institution, 
but  to  other  causes,  all  of  which  are  removable  without 
tampering  with  marriage,  and  every  one  of  which, 
unless  specially  dealt  with,  would  manifest  itself  under 
any  other  system  of  sex  relations  which  the  wit  of  man 
could  devise.  Inasmuch,  then,  as  we  still  should  have 
to  grapple  with  these  other  causes  of  mischief,  after 
we  had  rooted  up  the  monogamic  principle,  it  is  surely 
advisable  that  we  should  seek  to  begin  by  getting  rid  of 
them,  and  reserve  our  criticism  of  marriage  itself  until 
we  see  how  it  works  out,  after  they  have  been  abolished. 

These  extraneous  causes  of  evil,  for  the  consequences 
of  which  marriage  is  unfairly  condemned,  may  be 
compendiously  summed  up  under  three  headings:  (i) 
ignorance,  leading  to  heedlessness  in  marriage  selec- 
tion, and  consequent  disasters  after  marriage;  (2)  de- 
fects of  personal  character,  which  we  wrongly  treat 
as  finalities,  instead  of  insisting  that  the  individuals, 
because  they  could  cure  them,  must  be  held  responsible 
for  them;  and  (3)  bad  economic  conditions,  legal  in- 


ELLEN  KEY  AND  FREE  LOVE    213 

equalities  and  false  social  standards.  With  the  first  two 
of  these  I  have  perhaps  dealt  at  snflBcient  length.  Let 
us  pass  to  the  third,  by  way  of  a  preliminary  analysis 
of  another  false  moral  principle,  widely  prevalent  in 
the  modern  world. 

That  false  principle  is  the  tendency  of  men  and 
women,  when  they  discover  a  conflict  between  ideals 
and  facts,  to  surrender  their  ideals  instead  of  attacking 
and  overthrowing  the  facts.  One  could  illustrate  this 
by  endless  examples;  I  will  content  myself  with  one  or 
two.  A  few  years  ago,  I  saw  in  England,  on  the  adver- 
tisement placard  of  a  weekly  paper,  the  words  "  Should 
Shop  Assistants  Marry?"  The  article  turned  out  to  be 
an  analysis  of  the  conditions  under  which  shop  assist- 
ants live  —  the  long  hours  of  labour,  the  wretched 
wages,  insufficient  even  for  the  decent  support  of  a 
single  individual,  and  the  cramped  and  inadequate 
housing  to  which  these  wages  condemn  them;  and  the 
whole  argument  was  made  to  issue  in  the  conclusion, 
quite  frankly  accepted  by  the  writer,  that,  in  view  of 
their  conditions,  shop  assistants  ought  not  to  marry. 
I  can  scarcely  think  of  a  more  dramatic  exemplifica- 
tion of  the  fact  I  have  alleged.  The  question  which 
any  unhypnotized  man  would  ask,  is  not  ^'Should 
shop  assistants  marry?"  but  rather,  "Should  any 
human  being  submit  to  conditions  which  make  it 
practically  impossible  for  him  or  her  to  marry?"  In- 
stead of  asking  this  obvious  and  natural  question, 
however,  we  submit  like  cowards  to  the  mere  exist- 


214  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

ing  fact,  thereby  implicitly  assenting  to  the  fatalistic 
mythology  of  economic  determinism,  which  teaches 
that  outward  circumstance  alone  controls  man.  It  is  as 
if  we  should  argue  that  because  legs  are  inconvenient 
in  automobiles  (and  they  are  abominably  so  in  most 
of  them!),  we  ought  to  amputate  the  legs. 

Lest  this  parallel  should  seem  too  grotesque,  let  me 
hasten  to  add  that  here  in  America  we  do  actually 
resign  ourselves  to  a  practical  conclusion  scarcely  less 
absurd.  In  every  American  city  that  I  know  of,  it  is 
found  that  ordinary  comfort  and  decency  in  the  public 
street-cars  are  incompatible  with  large  profits  to  the 
corporations  which  own  the  franchises.  This  being  the 
case,  instead  of  saying  (as  a  civilized  nation  would  do) 
that  the  corporations  must  be  content  with  smaller 
profits,  we  blandly  acquiesce  in  the  perpetuation  of 
overcrowding,  discomfort,  filth  and  disease-laden  air 
in  our  public  conveyances.  If  anybody  objects  to  this, 
the  answer  —  given  even  by  women,  whose  sense  of 
personal  dignity  and  decency  is  daily  outraged  by  the 
intolerable  conditions  —  is  that  it  is  impossible  to 
provide  seats  for  all  in  cities  so  huge  as  New  York, 
Philadelphia  or  Chicago.  To  which  the  reply  is  that 
in  Europe  the  problem  has  been  solved  in  cities  still 
larger;  and  that  the  alleged  impossibility  will  vanish 
the  moment  the  American  public  resolves  to  make  the 
pecimiary  interests  of  corporations  altogether  second- 
ary to  that  public  convenience  the  service  of  which 
alone  justifies  their  existence. 


ELLEN  KEY  AND  FREE  LOVE    215 

The  principle  involved  in  our  attitude  towards  those 
social  conditions  which  make  marriage  difficult  for 
men  and  women  during  the  best  years  of  life  is  exactly 
similar.  Because  professional  men  are  poorly  paid  dur- 
ing those  years  when  they  ought  to  be  perpetuating 
the  sacred  gift  of  Hfe,  of  which  they  are  the  trustees 
and  depositaries,  we  assent  to  their  not  marrying,  in- 
stead of  abolishing  the  conditions  which  prevent  their 
doing  so.  Because  the  unmarried  woman,  if  she  is 
fairly  well  paid  for  her  work,  would  have  to  sacrifice 
certain  comforts  and  luxuries  by  accepting  the  highest 
functions  to  which  destiny  calls  her,  we  think  it  en- 
tirely natural  that  she  should  prefer  pleasure  to  duty. 
Instead  of  regarding  it  as  necessary,  or  even  as  pos- 
sible, so  to  change  the  economic  conditions  that  she 
need  lose  nothing  of  value,  we  accept  the  brute  eco- 
nomic facts  as  final,  and  begin  to  talk  of  abolishing 
marriage  and  giving  the  woman  a  right  to  mother- 
hood apart  from  it. 

Yet  how  can  anyone  fail  to  see  that  the  abolition  of 
marriage  and  the  sanctioning  of  parenthood  in  the  case 
of  immarried  persons  would  leave  the  economic  diffi- 
culty exactly  where  it  is  to-day  ?  Those  conditions 
which  militate  against  marriage  would  be  just  as  inim- 
ical to  parenthood  without  marriage  as  within  it.  If 
people  are  too  poor  to  maintain  a  home,  and  to  beget 
and  bring  up  children  on  the  basis  of  legally  sanctioned 
monogamic  union,  they  are  equally  too  poor  to  have 
homes  and  children  on  the  free-love  basis.  After  all,  it 


ai6  CRITICISMS  OF  LIFE 

is  the  maintenance  of  the  home  and  the  nurture  of  the 
children  that  cost  the  money,  and  therefore  constitute 
the  difficulty;  and  the  abolition  of  marriage  without 
change  in  the  economic  conditions  would  not  be  even 
the  beginning  of  a  solution  of  the  fundamental  prob- 
lem. How,  then,  can  we  dream  (as  free-love  theorists 
seem  to  do)  that  the  difficulty  arises  from  the  fact  that 
the  parents  are  bound  by  a  legally  sanctioned  tie, 
which  in  normal  cases  is  indissoluble  ?  The  idea  that 
the  removal  of  this  tie  will  produce  a  reform  is  a  part 
of  that  deep-seated  confusion  of  thought  which  blames 
an  institution  for  evils  manifested  in  connection  with 
it,  under  the  false  impression  that  they  spring  from  it. 
But  the  world  to-day  is  much  too  ready  to  make 
economic  conditions  the  scapegoat  for  its  derelictions 
of  social  duty.  We  hear  many  men  complain,  for  ex- 
ample, that  they  cannot  afford  to  marry  and  face  the 
expense  of  a  home  and  children,  when  what  they  really 
mean  is  that  they  cannot  afford  the  particular  kind  of 
home  which  the  standard  of  social  expectation  in  their 
set  prescribes  as  necessary.  I  recently  talked  with  a 
gentleman  who  bitterly  bemoaned  these  hard  condi- 
tions. He  was  a  rich  man,  but  had  built  up  his  for- 
tune by  his  own  exertions.  He  explained  that  he 
had  been  unable  to  marry  until  he  was  nearly  forty, 
at  which  time  he  united  himself  with  a  lady  of  ap- 
proximately equal  age.  He  told  me  that  it  was  the 
standing  grief  of  both  of  them  that  they  had  no  chil- 
dren and  could  never  have  any.  But,  he  added,  the 


ELLEN   KEY  AND  FREE  LOVE     217 

thing  was  inevitable,  for  from  the  time  he  was  twenty- 
five  until  he  was  approaching  forty,  he  had  not  earned 
enough  to  marry  on.  I  ventured  to  inquire  what  his 
income  had  been  when  he  was  twenty-six  or  twenty- 
seven.  "Twenty  dollars  a  week,"  he  replied.  Here- 
upon I  put  a  second  question:  "Are  you  not  aware 
that  at  least  seventy  or  eighty  per  cent,  of  the  families 
in  this  country  are  being  run,  and  run  reasonably  well, 
on  twenty  dollars  a  week  or  less,  even  to-day,  when  the 
purchasing  power  of  twenty  dollars  is  far  smaller  than 
it  was  in  your  time  ?  " 

This  is  the  hard  fact!  A  man  and  woman  can  live,  if 
they  have  common  sense  and  practical  wisdom,  and 
ethical  standards  instead  of  merely  conventional  ones, 
on  a  small  income  such  as  my  friend  specified.  True, 
they  cannot  have  automobiles  or  season  tickets  for  the 
opera,  but  they  can  have  "the  things  that  are  more 
excellent"  —  the  things  without  which  luxuries  speed- 
ily become  a  sickening  disappointment.  The  story  has 
recently  been  told  ^  of  a  middle-class  family  in  one  of 
the  Eastern  cities,  where  the  man  had  for  many  years 
been  an  accountant,  enjoying  a  fairly  good  salary, 
which,  like  most  middle-class  people,  he  and  his  wife 
had  regularly  spent,  usually  on  things  of  no  real  value. 
In  middle  life  he  lost  his  situation,  had  no  savings 
to  fall  back  upon,  and  was  speedily  face  to  face  with 
destitution.   In  this  predicament,  it  occurred  to  him 

^  One  Way  Out :  A  Middle-Class  New  Englander  Emigrates  to 
America.  By  William  Carleton.  (Boston:  Small,  Maynard.  Eighth 
issue,  1913.) 


ai8  CRITICISMS  OF  LIFE 

—  an  American  by  birth  and  ancestry,  who  had  lived 
all  his  life  in  his  own  country  —  that  he  might  try  the 
plan  of  "emigrating  to  America."  He  suggested  this 
to  his  wife,  and  found  her  willing  to  co-operate  in  the 
experiment.  He  removed  to  another  quarter  of  the 
city,  took  a  cheap  flat  in  the  working-class  district, 
and  accepted  a  job  at  nine  dollars  a  week  in  an  Italian 
labouring  gang.  Small  as  his  income  was,  he  found 
himself  able  to  save  out  of  it,  now  that  he  had  cut 
himself  free  from  the  expensive  idolatries  of  his  middle- 
class  life.  Having  now  leisure  in  his  evenings,  for  the 
first  time  in  his  life,  he  learned  the  Italian  language, 
in  order  that  he  might  be  able  to  converse  with  his 
co-workers,  and  went  to  the  night  school,  where  he 
learned  the  higher  branches  of  his  trade.  His  superior 
education,  coupled  with  his  business  training,  enabled 
him  speedily  to  rise  in  his  new  trade  to  the  position  of 
a  foreman,  and  subsequently  he  became  a  contractor, 
and  built  up  a  prosperous  business. 

This  is  an  illustration  of  the  real  point,  that  what  we 
commonly  mistake  for  poverty  is  not  really  poverty  at 
all,  but  slavery  to  preconceived  notions  dictated  by 
our  social  set.  A  man  who  has  the  rare  and  terrific 
courage  to  appear  poorer  than  the  bulk  of  the  persons 
with  whom  he  associates,  can  be  much  better  off  than 
the  cowardly  mass  of  us,  who,  with  larger  incomes, 
surrender  unconditionally  to  that  sordid  tradesmen's 
conspiracy  which  bids  us  deify  appearances.  The  great 
ends  of  life,  the  fundamental  needs  both  of  society  and 


ELLEN  KEY  AND  FREE  LOVE     219 

of  our  individual  nature,  are  deliberately  sacrificed  on 
the  altar  of  a  tawdry,  bourgeois  respectability;  and, 
having  made  the  sacrifice,  we  plead  our  cowardice  as 
its  own  justification.  A  sounder  sense  of  the  economic 
needs  of  man,  and  a  clearer  ethical  idealism  —  into 
both  of  which  things  we  shall  speedily  be  forced  by  the 
ghastly  consequences  of  our  present  practices  —  will 
drive  us  back  to  a  true  simplicity  of  life,  which  we  shall 
find,  as  did  the  man  whose  case  I  have  just  epitomized, 
infinitely  more  satisfying  than  the  life  of  vain  display 
to  which  at  present  we  suffer  ourselves  to  be  held  in 
bondage. 

All  of  which,  however,  is  neither  in  intention  nor  in 
effect  a  defence  of  conditions  as  they  are.  I  )H[eld  to  no 
man  in  my  economic  radicahsm;  I  am  only  anxious  to 
distinguish  between  real  poverty  and  imaginary,  and 
to  beat  back  the  widespread  hypocrisy  which  pleads 
impossibility  where  no  impossibility  exists,  and  denies 
that  an  educated  man  and  woman  can  do  what  mil- 
lions of  people  are  already  actually  doing.  Nor  am  I  so 
impressed  as  many  people  are  by  the  argument  from 
economic  insecurity.  I  admit  that  uncertainty  as  to 
the  future  is  a  good  reason  for  circumspection  and 
forethought;  I  deny  that  it  justifies  the  avoidance  of 
all  risks.  The  cowardice  which  will  take  no  chance 
of  the  possibility  of  future  poverty  —  which  will  not 
marry  until  it  is  assured  of  a  sufficient  income  in  per- 
petuity —  is  to  -  day  carried  to  entirely  indefensible 
lengths.  People  overlook  the  added  spur  which  respon- 


220  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

sibility  gives  to  the  spirit  of  enterprise.  I  have  several 
times  advised  young  people  to  make  what  are  called 
rash  marriages,  and  in  every  instance  my  imprudent 
counsel  has  been  justified  by  results.  The  struggling 
young  professional  man,  who  induces  the  woman  of 
his  choice  to  share  life  with  him,  at  once  has  tenfold 
the  incentive  of  his  bachelor  confrere  to  the  study  and 
exertion  which  lead  to  professional  advancement. 

It  is  astonishing  how  speedily  the  increase  of  wealth, 
and  the  consequent  raising  of  standards  of  social  ex- 
pectation in  this  country,  have  sapped  the  boasted 
spirit  of  the  pioneer.  Men  and  women  whose  grand- 
parents were  ready  to  defy  hardships  which  to  us  are 
almost  unimaginable,  are  imwilling  to-day  to  face  the 
possibility  of  having  to  substitute  the  pipe  for  the 
cigar  or  to  dispense  with  supernumerary  garments. 
This  slavery  to  luxury  is  the  most  enervating  disease 
that  can  attack  a  community.  At  a  time  when  even 
artisans  have  at  their  command  comforts  and  con- 
veniences impossible  to  the  European  monarchs  of  a 
century  ago,  we  find  men  and  women  afraid  to  marry, 
even  when  there  is,  practically  speaking,  no  reasonable 
ground  for  fear  that  they  will  ever  be  in  want  of  the 
necessaries  of  life.  The  removal  of  this  fantastic  night- 
mare, and  of  the  hypnosis  begotten  of  it,  is  at  least  as 
necessary  as  the  reform  of  economic  conditions. 

It  is  entirely  necessary  that  we  should  redistribute 
the  wealth  of  the  nation  on  the  principle  of  social  ex- 
pediency, instead  of,  as  at  present,  on  the  principle  of 


ELLEN  KEY  AND  FREE  LOVE    221 

every  man  for  himself,  and  the  devil  take  the  common 
good.  To  pay  the  bachelor  at  the  same  rate  as  the 
father  of  a  family,  to  tax  the  man  who  spends  his  whole 
income  on  himself  at  no  higher  rate  than  we  tax  the 
man  who  spends  his  income  on  a  wife  and  children,  is, 
socially  speaking,  insane.  To  settle  questions  of  wages 
by  what  people  can  be  forced  to  work  for,  instead  of 
by  what  scientific  knowledge  shows  to  be  necessary  for 
civic  and  national  efiiciency,  is  an  instance  of  individ- 
ualistic barbarism  which,  to  a  future  generation,  will 
be  unthinkable.  To  allow  an  employer  to  sponge  upon 
private  philanthropy  and  the  public  purse,  by  em- 
ploying girls  and  women  at  wages  which  have  to  be 
supplemented  from  these  other  sources  —  thereby 
making  the  capitalist  the  real  pauper  —  is,  entirely 
apart  from  ethical  considerations,  an  economic  im- 
becility. Of  all  of  these  things  we  shall  soon  grow 
heartily  ashamed,  to  such  an  extent  that  we  shall 
sweep  them  away.  Meantime,  however,  let  us  turn  the 
searchlight  on  the  dark  spot  in  ourselves.  Let  us  be 
certain  that  when  we  absolve  ourselves  from  our  most 
important  social  duties  on  the  ground  of  their  eco- 
nomic impossibility,  it  is  a  real  impossibility  that  deters 
us,  and  not  a  mere  figment  of  a  bemused  imagination. 

I  have  reserved  to  the  last,  the  examination  of  the 
most  fundamental  reason  for  opposing  Miss  Key's 
doctrine  of  free  love.  It  is  one  which  seems  never  to 
have  occurred  to  her,  or  to  Mr.  Shaw  or  to  George 


222  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

Meredith.  Yet  to  most  of  us  it  seems  so  self-evident 
and  conclusive  that  we  cannot  understand  how  any- 
serious  thinker  could  come  forward  with  revolution- 
ary proposals  without  taking  it  into  consideration. 
This  fimdamental  objection  is  the  fact  that,  when  once 
the  finality  of  marriage  is  abrogated,  when  law  and 
custom  sanction  unions  which  to-day  are  branded  as 
ilUcit,  and  a  right  to  parenthood  apart  from  marriage 
is  conferred  on  men  and  women,  the  stability  of  every 
union  would  be  menaced  in  such  a  fashion  as  to  render 
life  intolerable.  For  then  every  married  man  and 
woman  would  be  as  much  a  possible  and  legitimate 
object  of  sexual  selection  as  unmarried  men  and  women 
are  to-day  possible  objects  of  marriage  selection.  It 
is  curious  how  widely  this  patent  fact  is  overlooked. 
One  is  always  hearing  married  women,  for  example,  ex- 
pressing the  most  genuine  and  heartfelt  sympathy  for 
unmarried  women.  How  shameful,  they  say,  that  So- 
and-So,  who  would  make  such  an  ideal  mother,  can 
have  no  chance  of  figuring  in  that  capacity!  If  such 
women  realized  that  the  conferring  of  society's  sanc- 
tion on  motherhood,  under  such  circumstances,  would 
make  their  own  husbands  legitimate  objects  of  selec- 
tion by  the  unmarried  women  as  fathers  for  their 
children,  the  enormity  of  the  consequences  involved 
in  the  proposal  would  at  once  begin  to  dawn  upon 
them.  The  thought  of  a  state  of  society  in  which  gen- 
tlemen could  make  love  to  their  neighbours'  wives  with- 
out any  censure  by  law  or  public  opinion,  and  in  whidi 


ELLEN  KEY   AND  FREE  LOVE     223 

ladies  could  delicately  hint  their  preference  for  the 
husbands  of  their  friends,  is  too  repellent  to  be  seri- 
ously entertained.  Yet  this  would  be  an  inevitable 
consequence  of  such  changes  as  those  advocated  by 
Miss  Key  and  her  school.  One  cannot  tamper  with  the 
delicate  equipoise  of  the  fabric  of  practical  morality 
without  incurring  the  danger  of  overturning  the  entire 
system. 

Hard  cases  constantly  arise  under  our  present  or- 
ganization. Most  of  these  can,  as  I  have  shown,  be  got 
rid  of  without  attacking  the  fimdamental  principle  of 
lifelong  monogamy.  Yet  to  the  end  of  time,  under  any 
conceivable  system,  cases  of  hardship  must  needs  arise. 
It  is  vain  to  suppose  that  any  human  arrangement  can 
secure  immunity  from  misfortune,  in  a  world  whose 
forces  are  blind  and  indifferent  to  our  fate.  But  the 
experience  of  mankind  through  the  ages  has  not  gone 
for  nothing.  Not  without  good  cause  has  the  general 
will  decreed  that  the  choice  by  men  and  women  of 
each  other  must  be  irrevocable.  For  one  tragedy  which 
the  free-love  principle  would  avert,  it  would  cause  a 
hundred. 

It  is  quite  true  that  men  and  women  to-day,  and 
particularly  men,  by  no  means  live  up  to  the  ideal  em- 
bodied in  the  principle  of  Hfelong  monogamy.  The 
cynic  points  to  the  notorious  gap  between  profession 
and  practice,  and  urges  that  this  should  be  got  rid  of 
by  squaring  the  ideal  with  the  facts.  Such  a  proposal, 
however,  is  childishly  superficial.  Bad  as  the  facts  are, 


224  CRITICISMS  OF  LIFE 

low  as  is  the  level  of  actual  conduct,  things  would  be 
made  worse  and  not  better  by  lowering  our  standard. 
Moreover,  the  demand  of  monogamy  is  by  no  means 
an  impossible  one.  The  difficulty  of  continent  celibacy 
and  marital  fidelity  is  grossly  exaggerated.  It  is  neces- 
sary to  make  high  demands  on  human  nature,  not 
merely  in  order  to  bring  out  its  best,  but  even  to  pre- 
serve it  from  utter  degradation. 

I  have  said  of  Miss  Key  (and  the  stricture  is  equally 
true  of  Mr.  Shaw)  that  she  thinks  of  marriage  as  con- 
sisting merely  in  the  external  legal  tie  that  binds 
people  together.  This  is  the  conamon  presupposition 
of  the  whole  of  the  modern  free-love  school.  If  they 
think  at  all  of  the  old  saying,  "They  twain  shall  be 
one  flesh,"  they  think  of  it  as  the  expression  of  an  ar- 
bitrary supematuralistic  dogma.  They  do  not  perceive 
that  it  is  the  statement  of  a  self-evident  natural  fact. 
It  does  not  so  much  declare  what  ought  to  be  as 
describe  what,  in  normal  cases,  actually  happens  in 
everyday  experience.  A  man  and  woman,  associated 
for  years  in  the  inexpressible  intimacy  of  marriage, 
do  actually,  as  a  matter  of  simple  truth,  become  one 
flesh.  The  relation  between  them  is  verily  as  indisso- 
luble as  that  between  themselves  and  their  offspring. 
This  was  excellently  expressed  by  Mr.  George  W. 
Smith,  of  the  Philadelphia  Bar,  in  an  address  given 
before  the  Ohio  Bar  Association  in  1909:  — 

The  status  of  matrimony  may  be  stripped  of  its  inci- 
dents by  the  municipal  law,  but  no  decree  of  any  court, 


ELLEN  KEY  AND  FREE  LOVE    225 

or  act  of  legislature,  can  restore  the  natural  status  of  one 
who  has  been  married  to  that  of  one  who  never  has  been 
married.  Life  is  full  of  finalities,  and,  as  has  been  finely 
said,  there  is  something  tragic  in  everything  that  is  final.* 

Mr.  Smith  ought  to  have  added  that  no  decree  of 
nullity  pronounced  by  an  ecclesiastical  court  can  re- 
move the  effects  of  marriage.  His  statement  is  so  true 
that,  like  the  platitude  with  which  this  chapter  com- 
mences, it  sounds  to  our  sophisticated  ears  paradoxical. 
The  relation  of  husband  and  wife  is  so  inherently  in- 
frangible that  the  sunderance  of  it  by  legal  decree  can 
be  scarcely  less  tragic  than  the  worst  tragedy  it  is 
invoked  to  rectify.  The  closest  ties  of  consanguinity 
are  themselves  derived  from  this  relation,  which  we 
strangely  enough  imagine  we  can  abrogate  by  a  judicial 
sentence. 

I  may  not  conclude  without  alluding  to  one  more 
point  in  the  case  against  Miss  Key,  which  could  not  be 
adequately  dealt  with  save  in  a  lengthy  chapter;  and 
I  mention  it  merely  that  the  reader  may  not  suppose  I 
had  overlooked  it.  Sanity  and  virility  demand  that 
that  impulse  which  leads  to  the  union  of  the  sexes 
should  not  be  suffered  to  function  out  of  relation  to  the 
entire  hierarchy  of  hiunan  instincts,  emotions  and  sen- 
timents. It  must  be  so  correlated  and  systematized 
with  all  the  other  relations  between  man  and  woman, 
that  the  single  person  who  satisfies  the  one  desire  shall 

*  Quoted  by  the  Reverend  Edwin  Heyl  Delk,  D.D.,  in  an  article 
on  "Divorce  and  Social  Welfare,"  in  the  Biblical  World  for  January, 
1914.  . 


226  CRITICISMS   OF   LIFE 

harmonize  with  every  aspect  of  the  yearning  for  com- 
radeship. The  man  or  woman  who  permits  the  fleshly 
attraction  to  arise  towards  a  succession  of  persons  is 
on  the  way  to  insanity.  A  "scientific  breeding  of  the 
hmnan  race "  such  as  Mr.  Shaw  advocates  —  by  al- 
lowing people  "who  have  never  seen  each  other  before 
and  never  intend  to  see  each  other  again ''  to  have  chil- 
dren (under  certain  definite  conditions)  "without  loss 
of  honour,"  would  lead  to  the  disappearance  of  the 
human  race,  or  at  least  to  the  elimination  from  hu- 
manity of  all  that  is  distinctively  human. 

In  other  words,  that  union  which  is  based  solely  on  a 
sub-rational  fascination  is  not  worthy  of  the  name  of 
marriage.  A  true  hiunan  union  is  one  in  which  this 
primordial  bond  is  co-ordinated  with  every  other  taste 
and  interest  in  life.  Nor  is  such  harmony  of  the  ra- 
tional with  the  emotional  by  any  means  so  rare  or  so 
difficult  of  attainment  as  is  commonly  supposed.  Men 
and  women  are  "masters  of  their  fate"  to  a  far  greater 
extent  than  we  ordinarily  admit.  Its  mastery,  how- 
ever, necessitates  severe  self -discipline,  and  a  constant 
vigilance  in  the  adaptation  of  will  to  will  and  of  mind 
to  mind.  Yet  the  necessity  of  such  self-control  and 
self-determination,  instead  of  being  a  tragic  hardship, 
is  an  indispensable  element  in  moral  education  and 
character-building;  and  the  fact  that  marriage  calls  for 
it  is  one  of  the  strongest  of  all  the  reasons  in  favour  of 
marriage. 


CHAPTER  VII 

THE   RIGHT   TO   DIE:  MAETERLINCK  AND   INGERSOLL 
VERSUS   HUMANITY 

Among  the  world-wide  literary  reputations  of  our 
day,  none  is  more  thoroughly  deserved  than  that  of 
M.  Maurice  Maeterlinck.  It  is  twenty-five  years  since 
his  name  was  first  trumpeted  to  the  world  by  Octave 
Mirbeau,  in  a  glowing  article  in  the  Paris  "Figaro," 
entitled  "A  Belgian  Shakespeare."  Thanks  to  this  per- 
haps over-generous  appreciation,  Maeterlinck  "burst 
out  into  sudden  blaze,"  and  experienced  the  first 
flush  of  a  popularity  which  has  since  grown  more 
discriminating,  but  has  nevertheless  both  deepened 
and  widened  with  the  years  that  have  followed.  His 
American  admirers,  for  the  most  part,  read  him  only 
in  translation;  yet  inasmuch  as  they  have  the  rare 
powers  of  Mr.  de  Mattos  placed  at  their  service  in  the 
humble  but  important  function  of  translator,  their  loss 
is  less  than  it  would  be  under  other  circumstances.  It 
remains,  none  the  less,  a  loss;  for  one  can  never  quite 
appreciate  to  the  full  the  subtle  quality  of  Maeter- 
linck's thought  and  imagination  unless  one  has  the 
aid  of  his  very  characteristic  style.  There  is  about  his 
prose  an  ethereality  akin  to  that  of  the  atmosphere 
which  broods  over  "Pelleas  and  Melisande"  and  over 
"The  Blue  Bird." 


228  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

This  atmosphere,  half  intellectual,  half  imaginative, 
is  the  literary  reflex  of  that  temperamental  quality 
denoted  by  the  fashionable  word  of  the  moment:  mys- 
ticism. Now,  that  word  and  the  thing  it  signifies,  be- 
cause they  happen  at  the  moment  to  be  the  vogue, 
need  to  be  saved  from  their  friends  more  than  in  other 
times  they  may  need  to  be  rescued  from  their  enemies. 
There  is  a  fashion  in  philosophies  as  there  is  in  dress, 
and  popularization  seems  inevitably  to  involve  vul- 
garization —  using  that  term  in  its  depreciatory  sense. 
The  truth  is,  the  great  public  does  not  know  a  mystic 
when  it  sees  one,  and  is  accordingly  dependent  upon 
the  information  of  reviewers,  — as  the  tourist  is  com- 
monly dependent  on  the  asterisks  of  Baedeker  to  tell 
him  which  of  a  dozen  pictures  before  his  eyes  is  the 
masterpiece.  Maeterlinck  has  received  his  label;  we 
therefore  rush  to  him  to  see  what  mysticism  is.  At  the 
same  time  we  neglect  our  greater  homebred  mystics, 
because  our  diurnal  and  hebdomadal  oracles  have 
either  forgotten,  or  are  themselves  unaware,  that  sev- 
eral of  the  greatest  mystics  of  the  nineteenth  century 
are  to  be  found  in  the  first  rank  of  American  literary 
men. 

Emerson,  the  prince  of  modem  mystics  (whose 
so-called  "transcendentalism"  was,  indeed,  only  a 
clumsier  name  for  this  very  quality),  is  still  sold,  to  be 
sure,  by  the  cubic  foot  in  pasteboard  coffins,  in  our 
department  stores;  and  it  would  be  as  incorrect  not 
to  have  him  enshrined  upon  one's  shelves  as  it  would 


THE   RIGHT   TO   DIE  229 

be  to  be  caught  reading  him.  He  is  delivered  over, 
bound  hand  and  foot,  to  the  manufacturer  and  pur- 
veyor of  editions-de-looks,  and  so  unknown  is  he  to  our 
myriad  devotees  of  "the  latest  thing"  that  they  do 
not  recognize  his  voice  when  it  sounds  from  the  gramo- 
phone records  of  later  and  lesser  writers  whom  he  has 
inspired. 

Foremost  among  these  latter  is  M.  Maeterlinck,  of 
whom  it  is  no  depreciation  to  say  that,  as  a  thinker,  he 
is  essentially  unoriginal.  His  greatness  is  that  of  the 
poet.  In  this  territory  he  has  his  own  distinctive  field. 
His  thought,  at  its  best,  is  but  Emerson-and- water. 
No  Emersonian,  for  example,  could  read  "  La  Sagesse 
et  la  Destinee"  without  recognizing  a  body  of  doctrine 
with  which  he  has  long  been  familiar. 

It  is  unfortunate  that  the  public  cannot  dispense 
with  labels.  America,  despite  all  its  utilitarianism,  is 
fundamentally  the  most  idealistic,  the  most  mystical, 
because  the  most  intuitive,  of  modem  nations;  and 
this  quality  permeates  the  writing  not  alone  of  Emer- 
son, but  of  several  other  of  its  poets  and  prophets 
whose  renown  is  international,  and  who  therefore  (in 
accordance  with  precedent)  are  practically  unhon- 
oured  in  their  own  country.  Whitman,  for  example,  is 
a  mystic  to  the  core.  The  utterance  of  Holmes  and 
Lowell  is  enriched  by  the  same  Vision  Splendid.  But 
because  the  public  is  familiar  with  the  word  mysti- 
cism rather  than  the  thing,  these  men  are  abandoned 
to  a  cold-storage  immortality.  Such  writers  as  Mae- 


230  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

terlinck,  who  are  the  mere  retailers  of  their  inspiration, 
are  credited  with  a  solar  instead  of  a  lunar  radiance, 
while  the  true  luminaries  are  veiled  in  disastrous 
twilight. 

All  this,  I  repeat,  is  no  depreciation  of  Maeterlinck 
and  his  kind.  The  retailer  is  as  indispensable  a  func- 
tionary in  the  world  of  the  spirit  as  he  seems  to  be  in 
that  of  commerce,  and  it  does  not  lie  in  human  power 
to  discharge  this  function  more  exquisitely  than  does 
our  Belgian  poet.  "The  Blue  Bird"  is  a  perfect  prism 
into  which  the  white  light  pours,  and  from  which  it 
passes  out  with  all  its  latent  glories  made  visible  to 
every  eye.  Its  lesson  is  the  eternal  truth  of  mysticism. 
The  children  have  revealed  to  them  the  inner  meaning 
of  all  daily  familiar  things.  They  search  through  time 
and  eternity,  among  the  dead  and  among  the  unborn, 
in  the  kingdom  of  the  past  and  the  kingdom  of  the 
future,  for  ''the  great  secret  of  things  and  of  happi- 
ness." They  end  by  finding  it  in  their  cottage  — 
where  it  has  been  all  the  time. 

Definitions,  though  dangerous,  are  indispensable; 
and  we  must  attempt  some  approximate  and  working 
formula  for  mysticism,  if  only  to  shatter  the  prevalent 
confusion  which  makes  it  synonymous  with  mystifica- 
tion. No  two  things  could  really  be  more  distinct  than 
these,  yet  none  could  be  more  inextricably  confounded 
in  the  mind  of  the  devotee  of  fashion.  Our  definition, 
accordingly,  may  have  its  use,  even  though  it  serve 
only  as  a  challenge  to  the  label-worshipper.  We  shall 


THE  RIGHT   TO  DIE  231 

assert,  therefore,  that  mysticism  is  the  doctrine  or  the 
spiritual  attitude  which  seeks  the  meaning  of  life  in  its 
values  rather  than  in  its  facts.  It  is  thus  primarily  voli- 
tionalism  as  distinguished  from  intellectualism.  It 
sees  that  a  scientific  knowledge  of  the  data  and  uni- 
formities of  the  sense-world  can  never  reveal  to  us  the 
secrets  of  reality.  These  are  to  be  sought  in  the  cate- 
gories of  good-and-bad,  beautiful-and-ugly,  rather  than 
in  that  of  true-and-false.  It  does  not  in  the  least  in- 
validate the  sovereignty  of  truth,  but  it  emphasizes 
rather  the  truth-seeking  impulse  than  the  outer  facts 
to  the  discovery  of  which  that  impulse  leads.  Now, 
because  the  will  of  man  is  the  imique  and  solitary 
source  of  all  values  whatsoever,  mysticism  seeks  at 
home  for  those  answers  to  the  eternal  riddles  which 
science  can  only  seek  vainly  abroad.  Mysticism  adopts 
the  standpoint  of  Protagoras,  that  "man  is  the  meas- 
ure of  all  things."  The  choir  of  heaven  and  furniture 
of  the  earth  depend  upon  the  percipient  and  appraising 
mind  of  humanity  for  their  worth  and  meaning,  even 
if  not  for  their  existence.  Inasmuch,  then,  as  worth  is 
the  supreme  human  category,  mysticism  endorses 
unreservedly  the  great  saying  of  Isidore:  "Why  dost 
thou  wonder,  O  Man,  at  the  height  of  the  stars  or 
the  depth  of  the  sea  ?  Enter  into  thine  own  soul,  and 
wonder  there." 

Thus  it  happens  that  mysticism  is  the  absolute  op- 
posite of  dogmatism.  It  is  incurious  as  to  the  unan- 
swered and  unanswerable  questions  which  our  theolo- 


232  CRITICISMS  OF  LIFE 

gies  thrust  into  the  foreground,  making  their  guesses 
at  them  the  basis  of  religious  fellowship,  and  denying 
that  a  man  can  walk  with  confidence  among  the  shad- 
ows, except  he  take  their  winking  marsh-lights  for  his 
soul's  guide. 

From  this  high  plane  of  mysticism,  M.  Maeterlinck 
has  unfortunately  descended  in  his  latest  volume.^  He 
gives  us,  indeed,  much  thought  on  the  subject  of 
death  that  is  full  of  interest  and  helpfulness.  He  tears 
away  the  grotesque  veils  and  trappings  which  have 
concealed  the  true  lineaments  of  the  "dark  Mother." 
But  after  this,  he  proceeds  to  humour  that  prying  curi- 
osity as  to  the  fate  of  the  individual  after  he  has  sub- 
mitted to  death's  embrace,  which  the  authentic  mystic 
voice  has  always  rebuked.  He  does  not  censure,  as 
a  mystic  should,  the  vulgarity  which  betrays  its  own 
insecurity  and  lack  of  faith  by  peering  into  crystals, 
consulting  the  augurs  and  seeking  news  of  the  de- 
parted at  the  lips  of  trance-bound  mediums,  instead 
of  in  the  surviving  memorials  of  their  human  life  and 
work.  As  M.  Maeterlinck  here  fails  us,  let  us  revert 
to  the  high  and  searching  words  of  his  master:  — 

Of  immortality,  the  soul,  when  well  employed,  is  incuri- 
ous. It  is  so  well  that  it  is  sure  it  will  be  well.  It  asks  no 
questions  of  the  Supreme  Power.  The  son  of  Antiochus 
asked  his  father  when  he  would  join  battle.  "  Dost  thou 
fear,"  replied  the  King,  "that  thou  only  in  all  the  army 

1  Our  Eternity.  By  Maurice  Maeterlinck.  Translated  by  Alex- 
ander Teixeira  de  Mattos.   (New  York;  Dodd,  Mead  &  Co.,  1913.) 


THE  RIGHT  TO  DIE  233 

wilt  not  hear  the  trumpet?  '*  'T  is  a  higher  thing  to  con- 
fide that,  if  it  is  best  we  should  live,  we  shall  live  —  't  is 
higher  to  have  this  conviction  than  to  have  the  lease  of 
indefinite  centuries  and  millenniums  and  aeons.  Higher 
than  the  question  of  our  duration  is  the  question  of  our 
deserving.  Immortality  will  come  to  such  as  are  fit  for  it, 
and  he  who  would  be  a  great  soul  in  future  must  be  a 
great  soul  now.  It  is  a  doctrine  too  great  to  rest  on  any 
legend  —  that  is,  on  any  man's  experience  but  our  own. 
It  must  be  proved,  if  at  all,  from  our  own  activity  and 
designs,  which  imply  an  interminable  future  for  their 
play.^ 

"Higher  than  the  question  of  our  duration  is  the 
question  of  our  deserving."  There  speaks  the  true 
prophet  of  mysticism.  He  who  is  concerned  rather  to 
deserve  than  to  endure,  and  to  be  a  great  soul  now 
rather  than  in  some  remote  and  uncontrollable  future, 
is  the  truly  regenerate  man;  and  none  such  will  ever  be 
willing  to  waste  in  seance-rooms  the  time  that  is  all 
too  short  for  this  higher  and  harder  task. 

Into  the  questions  of  the  evidence  for  personal  con- 
tinuity which  M.  Maeterlinck  raises,  we  shall  not  now 
follow  him.  Our  present  purpose  is  to  study  his  teach- 
ing in  regard  to  what  has  been  called  euthanasia  — 
the  doctrine,  that  is,  that  the  sufferer  whose  end  seems 
near  shall  have  a  right  to  be  set  free  from  the  pangs  of 
mortality  by  the  action  of  the  physician.  His  judg- 
ment on  this  point  he  sets  out  in  the  following  para- 
graphs:— 

*  Emerson's  essay  on  "Worship,'  in  The  Conduct  of  Life. 


234  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

As  science  progresses,  it  prolongs  the  agony  which  is 
the  most  dreadful  moment  and  the  sharpest  peak  of 
human  pain  and  horror,  for  the  watchers,  at  least;  for 
very  often  the  consciousness  of  him  whom  death,  in 
Bossuet's  phrase,  has  "brought  to  bay"  is  already 
greatly  dulled  and  perceives  no  more  than  the  distant 
murmur  of  the  sufferings  which  it  seems  to  be  enduring. 
All  doctors  consider  it  their  first  duty  to  prolong  to  the 
uttermost  even  the  cruellest  pangs  of  the  most  hopeless 
agony.  Who  has  not,  at  the  bedside  of  a  dying  man, 
twenty  times  wished  and  not  once  dared  to  throw  himself 
at  their  feet  and  implore  them  to  show  mercy  ?  They  are 
filled  with  so  great  a  certainty,  and  the  duty  which  they 
obey  leaves  so  little  room  for  the  least  doubt,  that  pity 
and  reason,  blinded  by  tears,  curb  their  revolt  and  recoil 
before  a  law  which  all  recognize  and  revere  as  the  highest 
law  of  man's  conscience. 

One  day,  this  prejudice  will  strike  us  as  barbarous.  Its 
roots  go  down  to  the  unacknowledged  fears  left  in  the 
heart  by  religions  that  have  long  since  died  out  in  the 
intelligence  of  men.  That  is  why  the  doctors  act  as 
though  they  were  convinced  that  there  is  no  known 
torture  but  is  preferable  to  those  awaiting  us  in  the  un- 
known. They  seem  persuaded  that  every  minute  gained 
amid  the  most  intolerable  sufferings  is  snatched  from  the 
incomparably  more  dreadful  sufferings  which  the  mys- 
teries of  the  hereafter  reserve  for  men;  and,  of  two  evils, 
to  avoid  that  which  they  know  to  be  imaginary,  they 
choose  the  real  one.  .  .  . 

The  doctors,  on  their  side,  say  or  might  say  that,  in 
the  present  stage  of  science,  two  or  three  cases  excepted, 
there  is  never  a  certainty  of  death.  Not  to  support  life 
to  its  last  limits,  even  at  the  cost  of  insupportable  tor- 
ments, might  be  murder.   Doubtless  there  is  not  one 


THE  RIGHT   TO  DIE  235 

chance  in  a  hundred  thousand  that  the  patient  escape. 
No  matter.  If  that  chance  exist  which,  in  the  majority 
of  cases,  will  give  but  a  few  days,  or,  at  the  utmost,  a  few 
months  of  a  life  that  will  not  be  the  real  life,  but  much 
rather,  as  the  Romans  called  it,  "an  extended  death," 
those  hundred  thousand  useless  torments  will  not  have 
been  in  vain.  A  single  hour  snatched  from  death  out- 
weighs a  whole  existence  of  tortures.  .  .  . 

A  day  will  come  when  science  will  turn  upon  its  error 
and  no  longer  hesitate  to  shorten  our  woes.  A  day  will 
come  when  it  will  dare  and  act  with  certainty.  Once  the 
doctor  and  the  sick  man  have  learned  what  they  have  to 
learn,  there  will  be  no  physical  nor  metaphysical  reason 
why  the  advent  of  death  should  not  be  as  salutary  as 
that  of  sleep. ^ 

Against  this  eloquent  and  at  first  sight  impressive 
plea  for  the  right  of  the  physical  sufferer  to  be  released, 
and  consequently  of  the  doctor  to  kill,  there  are  many 
objections  to  be  raised.  These  I  shall  divide  for  con- 
venience into  two  classes.  The  first  I  shall  call  the 
objections  of  common-sense,  the  second  the  ethical 
objections.  The  division  is,  I  agree,  in  the  main  arbi- 
trary, and  is  resorted  to  only  for  convenience.  Both 
sets  of  arguments  are  entitled  to  both  labels;  but 
those  which  I  shall  group  under  the  distinctive  title 
of  ethical  are  those  which  do  not  spontaneously  occur 
to  the  practical  man,  and  are  generally  absent  from 
discussions  of  the  subject. 

I  would  first  draw  attention  to  the  interesting  fact 
that  the  case  for  euthanasia  in  the  abstract  commends 
^  Our  Eternity,  pp.  19-25. 


2^6  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

itself  to  many  who,  nevertheless,  would  find  them- 
selves unwilling  to  assent  to  it  in  any  particular  in- 
stance. On  general  grounds  it  seems  so  obvious,  so 
rational  and  so  humane  that  most  of  us  would  hesitate 
to  reject  it  unqualifiedly.  But  if  we  actually  find  our- 
selves exceedingly  reluctant  to  practise  or  to  sanction, 
in  some  special  case,  a  doctrine  to  which  we  have  given 
our  assent  in  the  abstract,  we  must  take  account  of 
that  reluctance  in  ourselves  as  a  datum  in  the  prob- 
lem, and  re-examine  the  argument  which  had  before 
seemed  so  convincing. 

Several  years  ago,  a  lady  was  suffering  from  an 
incurable  illness  which  made  it  impossible  for  her  to 
leave  her  bed,  or  even  to  rise  to  a  sitting  position.  She 
was  what  is  called  a  Rationalist,  and  she  sent  for  a 
nmnber  of  prominent  gentlemen  whose  views  of  reli- 
gion were  approximately  the  same  as  her  own.  These 
she  consulted  as  to  whether,  under  the  circumstances, 
she  was  not  entitled  either  to  take  her  own  life,  or  to 
have  her  irremediable  suffering  terminated  by  her  doc- 
tors. At  least  two  of  the  gentlemen  whose  counsel  she 
sought  had,  in  public  utterances,  endorsed  the  point  of 
view  which  M.  Maeterlinck  has  now  set  forth  afresh. 
But  neither  of  them  was  willing  to  accept  the  respon- 
sibility of  assenting  to  the  invalid  lady's  plea,  although 
every  canon  of  logical  consistency  demanded  that  they 
should  do  so.  The  pragmatic  test  proved  too  severe 
for  them. 

I  cite  this  case,  not  in  the  least  to  condemn  the  gen- 


THE  RIGHT   TO  DIE  237 

tlemen  in  question,  but  merely  to  reinforce  the  point  I 
have  just  made.  The  fact  that  men  who  had  pubUcly 
committed  themselves  to  the  doctrine  that  incurable 
sufferers  have  the  right  to  death,  yet  hesitated  to 
accord  that  right  to  the  one  particular  sufferer  who 
appealed  to  them,  does,  I  think,  show  that  when  they 
assented  to  the  general  thesis,  their  sympathies  trav- 
elled faster  than  their  judgment.  It  is  in  the  con- 
viction that  most  men  and  women  who  agree  with 
M.  Maeterlinck  are  in  the  same  position,  that  I  venture 
now  to  re-examine  the  grounds  of  his  doctrine.  The 
result  of  such  a  procedure  should  be  either  to  furnish 
us  with  valid  reasons  for  rejecting  the  doctrine,  or  else 
so  to  reinforce  it  that  we  shall  no  longer  hesitate  to 
consent  in  practice  to  what  we  have  assented  to  in 
theory. 

Of  the  common-sense  objections  to  which  I  have 
alluded,  the  first  is  that  which  M.  Maeterlinck  himself 
recognizes:  "In  the  present  stage  of  science,  two  or 
three  cases  excepted,  there  is  never  a  certainty  of 
death."  This  is  a  fact  which  has  much  more  weight 
with  the  experienced  physician  than  it  commonly  has 
with  the  laity.  The  public,  as  Mr.  Bernard  Shaw  has 
reminded  us,  is  far  too  ready  to  believe  in  the  infalli- 
bility of  the  doctor;  but  the  doctor,  to  do  him  justice, 
is  very  rarely  such  a  fool  as  to  believe  in  his  own  infal- 
libility. He  is  more  apt  to  say,  as  did  Pius  IX  of  his 
hot-headed  adorers,  "Questi  infallibilisti  mi  faranno 
fallire."  The  opinions  he  utters  are  hedged  about  in 


238  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

his  own  mind  with  all  sorts  of  qualifications  and  pro- 
visos, which  he  cannot  make  intelligible  to  the  anxious 
relatives  of  his  patient.  What  they  want  is  a  definite 
assurance,  an  unqualified  yes  or  no.  When  he  says,  "I 
think  your  father  will  die,"  or,  "I  helieroe  your  sister 
will  get  better,"  he  is  imderstood  to  say,  ^' I  know  your 
father  will  die,"  or,  "//  is  certain  that  your  sister  will 
recover."  The  notorious  fallibility  of  these  prognos- 
tications, recognized  in  general  by  everybody,  is  for- 
gotten by  the  anxious  ones  in  connection  with  the 
case  in  which  they  are  immediately  interested. 

Now  if,  when  a  doctor  gives  a  patient  up,  he  should 
proceed  to  end  that  patient's  sufferings,  it  would 
never  be  possible  afterwards  to  prove  either  that  the 
patient  would  or  that  he  would  not  have  recovered. 
As  illustrative  cases  have  occurred  in  everybody's  ex- 
perience, I  may  be  permitted  to  cite  two  from  my  own. 
A  man  suffering  from  an  incurable  disease  was  on  two 
separate  occasions,  by  two  different  doctors,  given  less 
than  twenty-four  hours  to  live.  He  died  seven  years 
later,  having  in  the  meantime  never,  indeed,  been 
restored  to  full  health,  but  having  often  been  well 
enough  to  be  up  and  doing.  My  second  instance  is 
that  of  a  woman  who,  eighteen  years  ago,  was  de- 
clared to  be  dying  of  phthisis,  and  to  have  less  than  a 
week  to  live.  She  is  alive  to-day,  in  better  health  than 
she  ever  had  before,  and  with  no  symptom  of  phthisis 
or  any  similar  disease.  It  is  perfectly  possible  that 
three  or  four  doctors  in  consultation  might  have  agreed 


THE  RIGHT  TO  DIE  239 

on  the  verdicts  to  which  I  have  referred,  —  although  I 
gravely  doubt  whether  any  set  of  doctors  would  ever 
concur  in  such  a  judgment,  if  the  responsibility  of  act- 
ing upon  their  conviction  were  imposed  upon  them. 
Suppose  they  had  done  so,  however,  in  my  second  in- 
stance :  the  woman  in  question  would  simply  have  been 
cut  off  in  the  midst  of  her  days,  and  her  family  would 
have  been  robbed  of  the  joy  and  consolation  of  many 
years  of  her  beneficent  activity.  When  M.  Maeter- 
linck says,  "Doubtless  there  is  not  one  chance  in  a 
hundred  thousand  that  the  patient  escape,"  he  ex- 
presses immensely  more  certitude  than  the  competent 
doctor  usually  feels.  Medical  prophecies  in  such  cases 
are  generally  the  vaguest  of  guesswork,  and  the  doc- 
tors (at  least  among  themselves)  admit  that  they  are 
so.  Medical  science  is  extremely  immature,  and  the 
factors  in  any  given  case  are  altogether  too  compli- 
cated to  warrant  a  confident  induction. 

The  second  objection  on  the  plane  of  common-sense 
is  the  undeniable  possibility  of  the  abuse  of  the  power 
of  hfe  and  death,  by  venal  physicians  acting  in  collu- 
sion with  interested  and  imscrupulous  relatives.  If  the 
right  were  given  at  all,  it  would  have  to  be  given  to 
three  or  four  doctors  at  most,  acting  upon  their  unani- 
mous judgment.  We  know  too  much,  however,  of  the 
blinding  effect  of  self-interest  even  upon  men's  con- 
scientious opinions,  to  place  the  issues  of  life  and  death 
in  such  hands.  Witness,  in  the  recent  unsavoury  case 
of  the  man  Thaw,  the  flatly  self-contradictory  opin- 


240  CRITICISMS  OF  LIFE 

ions  as  to  his  sanity  expressed  by  the  two  sets  of 
alienists  —  those  retained  in  his  interest,  and  those 
retained  by  the  State.  With  perfectly  shocking  unan- 
imity, his  own  mental  experts  declared  him  sane;  with 
equal  confidence  the  other  side  voted  him  insane.  To 
decide  when  doctors  disagree  is  proverbially  difficult; 
experience  also  shows,  however,  that  it  would  often  be 
exceedingly  dangerous  to  act  when  they  do  not  dis- 
agree. It  seems  fairly  probable  that  the  average  lon- 
gevity of  wealthy  people  would  be  materially  decreased 
if  their  heirs  had  the  right  to  authorize  the  adminis- 
tration of  the  quietus  whenever  three  or  four  doctors 
could  be  found  to  concur  in  declaring  recovery  impos- 
sible. This  statement  may  sound  cynical,  yet  it  is 
assuredly  not  devoid  of  a  justifying  basis  in  experi- 
ence. 

The  third  obvious  objection  is  that  to  make  doc- 
tors responsible  for  the  termination  of  human  suffering 
would  inevitably  undermine  that  sense  of  the  sanctity 
of  human  life  which  is  one  of  the  most  valuable  of  the 
hard-won  conquests  of  civilization.  It  would  increase 
the  already  exaggerated  horror  of  mere  physical  suf- 
fering, and  would  place  an  appalling  responsibility 
upon  judgments  biased  by  the  contemplation  of  bodily 
pain.  M.  Maeterlinck's  own  words  are  here  instruc- 
tive: "Who  has  not,  at  the  bedside  of  a  dying  man, 
twenty  times  wished  and  not  once  dared  to  throw 
himself  at  their  [the  doctors']  feet  and  implore  them  to 
show  mercy  ?"  But  who,  we  may  add,  has  not  often 


THE  RIGHT  TO  DIE  241 

had  this  feeling  in  connection  with  a  patient  who  has 
subsequently  recovered?  The  doctor  to-day  has  law 
and  public  opinion  to  reinforce  his  resistance  to  such 
appeals.  But  if  the  law  were  on  the  side  of  the  agonized 
lay  onlookers,  we  cannot  doubt  that  the  doctor's  judg- 
ment would  often  be  overborne  by  their  importunity. 
It  is  interesting  to  note  that  the  old  indifference  to 
the  sanctity  of  life  was  rooted  in  insensitiveness  to 
bodily  and  mental  suffering.  It  would  be  strange  if 
our  developed  sensibility  to  these  things  should  lead 
finally  to  a  recurrence  of  the  very  evil  from  which  it 
has  delivered  us  —  if  we  should  now  be  willing  to  sac- 
rifice life  from  excessive  horror  of  suffering,  just  as 
men  in  former  times  sacrificed  it  through  an  inade- 
quate sensitiveness.  We  are  so  familiar  with  modem 
humanitarianism,  that  we  are  in  danger  of  forgetting 
how  very  modem  it  is.  Not  only  do  we  find  among 
primitive  savages  the  practice  of  killing  off  old  mem- 
bers of  the  tribe,  in  order  not  to  be  handicapped  in 
warfare  or  to  have  the  food  supply  unprofitably  used; 
not  only  in  Greece  and  Rome  was  the  exposure  of 
infants  practised,  as  a  ghastly  means  of  reducing  the 
surplus  population;  but  down  through  the  Christian 
ages,  even  to  the  beginning  of  the  nineteenth  century, 
human  life  was  treated  with  a  levity  which  to-day 
seems  unimaginable.  Scores  of  trivial  offences  were 
punishable  by  death.  Duelling,  blood  feuds  and  pri- 
vate warfare  were  widely  prevalent.  The  sacrifice  of 
men  by  thousands  in  dynastic  and  religious  wars  was 


242  CRITICISMS  OF  LIFE 

taken  as  a  matter  of  course.  When  to-day  we  read 
in  *' Sartor  Resartus"  the  vivid  picture  of  thirty  men 
from  the  British  village  of  Dumdrudge,  meeting  in 
Spain  thirty  from  a  French  Dumdrudge  whom  they 
had  never  seen  before  and  with  whom  they  had  no 
cause  of  quarrel,  the  two  parties  blowing  one  another's 
brains  out  at  the  word  of  command,  we  forget  how 
very  novel  was  Carlyle's  moral  recoil  and  protest,  even 
so  recently  as  the  eighteen-thirties.  Christendom  has 
always  assented  with  its  lips  to  the  doctrine  that  a 
man  is  of  more  value  than  many  sparrows,  but  in 
practice  it  has  held  that  most  men  are  not  really  worth 
much  more  than  a  comparatively  small  number  of 
sparrows.  The  new  feeling,  which  Carlyle  voiced, 
and  which  is  now  practically  universal  (being  shared 
by  everybody  except  monarchs,  diplomatists,  inter- 
national capitalists,  militarist  philosophers  and  arma- 
ment manufacturers),  is  thus  a  very  recent  acqui- 
sition; and,  while  we  must  guard  against  foohsh 
exaggerations  of  it,  we  yet  must  not  suffer  it  to  be  lost 
or  even  weakened.  Those  who  agree  with  M.  Maeter- 
linck are  undoubtedly  in  danger  of  carrying  the  horror 
of  suffering  to  such  a  point  that  it  will  overbear  the 
sense  of  the  sanctity  of  life. 

We  turn  now  to  the  second  class  of  objections  to  the 
Maeterlinck  doctrine  —  those  which  I  have  for  con- 
venience called  ethical.  The  first  of  these  is  that  his 
argument,  although  limited  by  him  to  the  question  of 


THE  RIGHT   TO   DIE  243 

euthanasia,  would  undoubtedly  justify  suicide.  It  is 
true  that  he  is  talking  of  the  doctor's  right  to  kill,  but, 
on  his  own  showing,  this  is  derivative  from  the  suffer- 
er's right  to  die.  Now,  a  person  who  has  a  right  to 
death  has  the  right  to  kill  himself  as  well  as  to  be 
killed  by  others.  If,  moreover,  intense  bodily  suffer- 
ing can  give  this  right,  it  is  unthinkable  that  mental 
anguish,  often  much  more  unendurable,  would  not 
equally  confer  it.  There  is  thus  no  question  but  that 
M.  Maeterlinck  has  given  his  sanction  to  far  more  than 
he  probably  intended.  There  is  no  logical  halting- 
place  between  his  position  and  that  of  the  late  Robert 
IngersoU.  Both  take  a  stand  which,  consciously  or 
unconsciously,  is  based  upon  the  extremest  individ- 
ualism, and  both  deny,  whether  wittingly  or  not,  that 
there  is  anything  absolute  or  unconditionally  binding 
in  morality.  Neither  takes  any  account  of  the  duty  of 
the  sufferer,  or  of  the  services  which,  during  and  even 
because  of  his  suffering,  he  may  be  able  to  render. 

To  prove  this,  I  will  quote  a  number  of  sentences 
from  Colonel  IngersolFs  letters  and  newspaper  inter- 
views on  the  question  "Is  Suicide  a  Sin?"  ^ 

Under  many  circumstances  a  man  has  the  right  to  kill 
himself.  When  life  is  of  no  value  to  him,  when  he  can  be 
of  no  real  assistance  to  others,  why  should  a  man  con- 
tinue ?  .  .  . 

So  when  a  man  has  committed  some  awful  crime,  why 

*  These  quotations  are  taken  from  volume  vii  of  the  Dresden 
edition  of  IngersoU's  works,  published  by  C.  P.  Farrell,  New  York,  in 
1900.    The  italics  are  mine. 


244  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

should  he  stay  and  ruin  his  family  and  friends  ?   Why 
should  he  add  to  the  injury  ?  .  .  . 

Why  should  a  man,  sentenced  to  imprisonment  for 
life,  hesitate  to  still  his  heart  ?  The  grave  is  better  than 
the  cell.  Sleep  is  sweeter  than  the  ache  of  toil.  The  dead 
have  no  masters. 

Mr.  IngersoU  proceeds  to  defend  the  suicide  against 
the  charge  of  cowardice.  He  admits  that  such  a  man 
may  lack  moral  courage,  but  maintains  that  he  dis- 
plays a  high  degree  of  physical  bravery.  He  then  con- 
tinues as  follows:  — 

If  men  had  the  courage,  they  would  not  linger  in 
prisons,  in  almshouses,  in  hospitals;  they  would  not  bear 
the  pangs  of  incurable  disease,  the  sense  of  dishonour; 
they  would  not  live  in  filth  and  want,  in  poverty  and  hun- 
ger, neither  would  they  wear  the  chain  of  slavery.  All 
this  [sic]  can  be  accounted  for  only  by  the  fear  of  death, 
or  "of  something  after."  .  .  . 

When  there  is  no  fear  of  the  future,  when  death  is 
believed  to  be  a  dreamless  sleep,  men  have  less  hesita- 
tion about  ending  their  lives. 

He  then  goes  on  to  denounce  the  law  of  New  York 
State  which  made  the  attempting  of  suicide  a  crime. 
Of  this  law  he  says,  with  one  of  his  ridiculous  rhetorical 
flourishes,  that  it  was  *'bom  of  superstition,  passed 
by  thoughtlessness,  and  enforced  by  ignorance  and 
cruelty."  In  a  later  utterance,  speaking  of  a  man  dying 
of  cancer,  he  writes:  — 

This  man,  suffering  agonies  beyond  the  imagination  to 
conceive,  is  of  no  use  to  himself.  His  life  is  but  a  succes- 


THE  RIGHT  TO  DIE  245 

sion  of  pangs.  He  is  of  no  use  to  his  wife,  his  children,  his 
friends  or  society. 

It  will  be  seen  that  Mr.  IngersolFs  doctrine  is  very  far- 
reaching.  Unlike  M.  Maeterlinck,  he  issues  his  plenary 
indulgence  not  only  to  the  hopeless  invalid,  but  to  the 
criminal,  the  man  sentenced  to  Ufelong  imprisonment, 
the  inmate  of  the  almshouse  or  the  hospital,  and, 
apparently  without  any  reservation,  to  all  victims  of 
poverty  and  hunger,  filth  and  want.  It  is  difficult  to 
speak  restrainedly  of  such  a  teaching;  yet  it  is  neces- 
sary to  do  so,  since  much  of  this  seems,  however  unde- 
signedly, to  be  implied  in  the  teaching  of  M.  Maeter- 
linck, whom  I  respect,  and  would  seek  to  turn  from 
the  error  of  his  ways. 

The  first  point  to  be  noted  is  that  suicide  is,  in  the 
great  majority  of  cases,  a  retreat  from  evils  which  one 
ought  to  stay  and  fight.  It  was  so  in  the  teaching 
of  Seneca.  This  man,  one  of  the  purest  moralists  who 
ever  lived,  submitted  to  the  tyranny  of  Nero  because 
he  clung  to  the  thought  that  he  could  at  any  time 
escape  by  means  of  suicide  (as  he  ultimately  did) 
when  that  tyranny  became  unendurable.  He  laid 
down,  as  explicitly  as  Mr.  IngersoU,  the  doctrine  that 
a  man  has  always  the  right  to  choose  the  time  and 
manner  of  his  death:  — 

To  death  alone  it  is  due  that  life  is  not  a  punishment; 
that,  erect  beneath  the  frowns  of  fortune,  I  can  preserve 
my  mind  unshaken  and  master  of  itself.  I  have  one  to 
whom  I  can  appeal.  I  see  before  me  the  crosses  of  many 


246  CRITICISMS  OF  LIFE 

forms.  ...  I  see  the  rack  and  the  scourge,  and  instru- 
ments of  torture  adapted  to  every  limb  and  to  every 
nerve;  but  I  also  see  Death.  She  stands  beyond  my 
savage  enemies,  beyond  my  haughty  fellow-countrymen. 
Slavery  loses  Us  bitterness  when  by  a  step  I  can  pass  to 
liberty.  .  .  . 

Wherever  you  look,  there  is  the  end  of  evils.  You  see 
that  yawning  precipice  —  there  you  may  descend  to 
liberty.  You  see  that  sea,  that  river,  that  well  —  liberty 
sits  at  the  bottom.  .  .  .  Do  you  seek  the  way  to  freedom  ? 
—  you  may  find  it  in  every  vein  of  your  body. 

Depart  from  Ufe  as  your  impulse  leads  you,  whether 
it  be  by  the  sword,  or  the  rope,  or  the  poison  creeping 
through  the  veins;  go  your  way  and  break  the  chains  of 
slavery.  Man  should  seek  the  approbation  of  others  in 
his  life;  his  death  concerns  himself  alone.  That  is  the 
best  which  pleases  him  most.  .  .  .  The  eternal  law  has 
decreed  nothing  better  than  this,  that  life  should  have 
but  one  entrance  and  many  exits.  Why  should  I  endure 
the  agonies  of  disease,  and  the  cruelties  of  human  tyranny y 
when  I  can  emancipate  myself  from  all  my  torments  and 
shake  off  every  bond  ?  For  this  reason,  but  for  this  alone, 
life  is  not  an  evil  —  that  no  one  is  obliged  to  live.  The 
lot  of  man  is  happy,  because  no  one  continues  wretched 
but  by  his  fault.  If  life  pleases  you,  live.  If  not,  you 
have  a  right  to  return  whence  you  came.^ 

The  phrases  which  I  have  italicized  prove  my  con- 
tention. Instead  of  enduring  slavery  because  by  a  step 
he  could  pass  to  liberty,  instead  of  submitting  to  the 
cruelties  of  human  tyranny  because  it  was  in  his  power 

*  These  passages,  from  various  writings  of  Seneca,  are  collected 
by  Lecky,  in  his  History  of  European  MoralSy  vol.  i,  chap.  2. 


THE  RIGHT   TO  DIE  247 

to  emancipate  himself,  Seneca  ought  to  have  organized 
an  opposition  to  slavery,  and  a  revolution  against  the 
insane  barbarities  of  Nero.  He  ought  to  have  inspired 
a  public  opinion  which  would  have  made  these  things 
impossible,  instead  of  teaching  a  doctrine  of  submis- 
sion, and  making  it  endurable  by  showing  the  victims 
of  tyranny  how  they  could  escape.  No  great  social 
evil  would  ever  have  been  rectified  if  men  had  taken 
the  line  merely  of  averting  its  consequences  to  them- 
selves instead  of  determining  to  abolish  its  cause. 

It  is  peculiarly  strange  that  Colonel  Ingersoll  (who 
evidently  had  got  his  inspiration  from  Seneca  in  this 
matter)  should  have  omitted  to  notice  that  in  sanc- 
tioning suicide,  he  was  doing  the  very  thing  which  he 
had  always  emptied  the  vials  of  his  wrath  upon  Chris- 
tian theologians  for  doing.  These  men  had  used  the 
doctrine  of  immortality  as  an  anaesthetic.  Throughout 
the  centuries  they  had  reconciled  the  poor  to  poverty, 
and  women  to  degradation  and  moral  outrage,  by  the 
teaching  of  an  eternity  of  bliss  which  was  to  compen- 
sate for  the  evils  of  the  present  Hfe.  Nobody  ever 
denounced  this  teaching  more  fiercely  than  Robert 
Ingersoll.  He  was  quite  right  to  do  so;  and  it  cannot 
be  doubted  that  the  complete  change  of  attitude  in 
regard  to  this  matter  which  we  see  in  many  churches 
to-day,  is  in  some  measure  due  to  his  fiery  eloquence. 
How,  then,  could  he  fail  to  see  that  in  advising  peo- 
ple to  escape  by  suicide  from  remediable  evils,  he  was 
doing  the  very  thing  which  he  had  always  denounced  ? 


248  CRITICISMS  OF  LIFE 

To  offer  a  dreamless  sleep  to  persons  who  long  to  be 
relieved  from  suffering  is  morally  identical  with  offer- 
ing heavenly  bliss.  Indeed,  Mr.  Ingersoll's  offer  is 
just  as  much  an  unwarrantable  assumption  of  know- 
ledge as  the  theologians'.  Nor  does  the  so-called  agnos- 
tic escape  in  this  matter  without  falling  into  open  and 
flagrant  self-contradiction.  His  argument  is  a  per- 
petual alternation  of  dogmatism  and  denial.  In  one 
breath  he  admits  that  he  cannot  aj65rm  or  deny  immor- 
taUty;  in  the  next,  he  dogmatically  denies  it  by  calling 
death  a  dreamless  sleep.  What  supernatural  revela- 
tion had  come  to  this  rejector  of  the  supernatural  ? 
Who  told  him  that  death  is  a  dreamless  sleep  ?  By 
calling  it  so  he  exactly  duplicates  the  blunder  of  the 
theologian  in  dogmatizing  about  things  of  which  he 
knows  nothing. 

My  argument,  however,  in  no  wise  stands  or  falls 
by  any  conclusion  we  may  come  to  on  the  question  of 
personal  continuance  after  death.  Whether  death  be  a 
dreamless  sleep  or  the  gate  of  a  larger  Ufe,  it  still  would 
remain  true  that  our  duty  is  to  resist  and  overcome 
evils,  not  to  run  away  from  them.  The  downfall  of 
Rome  was  due  in  part  to  the  fact  that  such  men  as  the 
Stoics  and  the  great  jurists  acquiesced  in  social  atroci- 
ties which  they  ought  to  have  combated.  The  long 
arrest  of  Christian  civilization  was  due  to  a  similar 
resignation  on  the  part  of  those  who  could  have  been 
the  pioneers  of  better  things.  Seneca's  teaching,  that 
man  is  happy  solely  because  he  can  run  away  from  his 


THE  RIGHT  TO  DIE  249 

evils,  is  as  demoralizing  as  the  ecclesiastical  doctrine 
that  we  may  not  resist  divinely-ordained  royal  scoun- 
drels, and  that  we  are  to  reconcile  ourselves  to  their 
barbarities  by  thinking  of  compensations  to  come  in  a 
life  hereafter. 

Equally  strange  is  the  moral  blindness  displayed  by 
Colonel  Ingersoll  in  his  reiterated  assertion  that  the 
sufferer  from  an  incurable  disease  is  "of  no  use''  to 
himself,  his  wife,  his  children  or  society.  Universal 
experience  demonstrates  that  human  wisdom  and  in- 
sight are  so  intensified  by  suffering  that  he  who  has 
endured  most  can  give  the  wisest  counsel  to  others. 
"To  have  suffered  much  is  like  knowing  many  lan- 
guages. Thou  hast  learned  to  understand  all,  and  to 
make  thyself  intelligible  to  all.''  Mr.  Ingersoll  fell  into 
the  vulgar  error  of  thinking  that  a  hmnan  being  can 
only  be  of  "use"  when  he  can  do  bodily  work,  or,  at 
all  events,  such  mental  work  as  necessitates  physical 
activity.  He  forgot  that  the  most  profoundly  signi- 
ficant deeds  in  human  life  are  those  that  we  do  with 
our  minds  and  with  our  tongues.  A  word  spoken  at  a 
solemn  moment  may  be  a  mightier  force  for  good  or  ill 
than  any  bodily  act  whatever.  lago  was  only  a  talker; 
Socrates  and  Jesus  did  little  but  speak.  Who  has  not 
known  of  sufferers  from  incurable  disease  who,  by  their 
serenity  under  pain,  and  their  wise  counsel  to  those 
about  them,  have  been  a  benediction  to  mankind  ? 

On  Maeterlinck's  and  Ingersoll's  principles.  Cap- 
tain Scott  and  his  two  companions,  instead  of  awaiting 


2  JO  CRITICISMS  OF  LIFE 

death  by  starvation,  would  have  been  entirely  justified 
in  precipitating  the  end.  Their  fate  was  a  thousand- 
fold more  certain  than  that  of  the  most  hopeless  invalid 
is  to  the  most  experienced  physician.  The  odds  against 
their  rescue  were  literally  as  infinity  to  one.  Prudence, 
and  the  philosophy  which  Ingersoll  borrowed  from 
Seneca,  would  alike  have  dictated  self-slaughter.  Yet, 
because  they  abstained,  and  because  they  endured  to 
the  end,  they  have  rendered  a  service  to  mankind  for 
all  time,  which  is  of  more  value  than  all  the  other  re- 
sults of  their  expedition  combined. 

It  is  a  mere  vulgarity  to  say,  even  in  the  case  of 
a  man  dying  of  cancer,  that  he  is  of  no  use  to  himself 
or  others.  I  have  known  more  than  one  such  case  in 
which  the  character  of  the  sufferer,  through  his  suffer- 
ing, became  ever  more  serene  and  radiant,  so  that  he 
gave  such  a  gift  of  example  and  counsel  to  the  watch- 
ers at  his  bedside  that  their  own  lives  were  transfigured 
thereby.  The  preciousness  of  this  influence  was  such 
that  neither  the  man  himself  at  the  time,  nor  the 
onlookers  in  their  subsequent  retrospect,  would  have 
been  willing  to  curtail  by  a  single  hour  the  sufferer's 
existence.  A  noble  death-bed  is  one  of  the  most  potent 
and  exalting  of  spiritual  influences;  yet  not  through 
the  fact  of  death,  but  through  the  fact  of  suffering 
worthily  borne,  and  of  spiritual  power  displayed  in 
spite  of  it. 

Both  Maeterlinck  and  Ingersoll  exhibit  a  singular 
psychological  ignorance  in  their  contention  that  the 


THE  RIGHT  TO  DIE  251 

refusal  to  hasten  death  is  due  to  the  survival  of  reli- 
gious terror.  The  roots  of  this  prejudice,  says  Maeter- 
linck, "go  down  to  the  unacknowledged  fears  left  in 
the  heart  by  religions  that  have  long  since  died  out  in 
the  intelligence  of  men."  So  far  is  this  from  the  truth, 
that  the  sense  of  the  sanctity  of  life  is  strongest  of  all 
in  those  who  are  most  completely  deh)^notized  and 
freed  from  superstitious  doctrines  and  from  the  ter- 
rors they  engender.  In  the  Middle  Ages,  just  as  in 
China  to-day,  contempt  for  life  and  readiness  to  inflict 
death  were  at  their  maximum  when  superstition  was 
most  rampant.  And  among  the  thinkers  of  Pagan  an- 
tiquity, it  is  precisely  those  who  are  most  completely 
raised  above  these  irrational  terrors,  who  repudiate 
the  notion  of  a  man's  right  to  forsake  his  post.  It  is 
the  clear-eyed  and  fearless  Aristotle  who  declares  that 
the  suicide  acts  unjustly  not  to  himself,  but  to  the 
State.  It  is  Socrates  whose  free  soul  instinctively  re- 
coils from  the  idea  of  self -slaughter, — Socrates,  who  is 
serenely  convinced  that  no  evil  can  befall  a  good  man 
either  in  Hf e  or  after  death,  and  who  discourses  at  large 
of  the  sacred  mysteries  of  the  soul,  while  he  is  await- 
ing the  execution  of  that  imjust  sentence  which  con- 
demned his  judges  more  surely  than  it  condemned  him. 
The  objection  of  Socrates  to  suicide  is  an  expression 
of  the  deep  moral  instinct  in  him.  When  Cebes  asks 
why  suicide  is  held  not  to  be  right,  the  keen,  ready- 
witted  dialectician  is  at  a  loss  for  a  rational  answer. 
He  cannot  say  why,  "when  a  man  is  better  dead,  he  is 


252  CRITICISMS  OF  LIFE 

not  permitted  to  be  his'own  benefactor."  He  accord- 
ingly falls  back  upon  mystical  language:  — 

There  is  a  doctrine  uttered  in  secret,  that  man  is 
a  prisoner  who  has  no  right  to  open  the  door  of  his 
prison  and  run  away;  this  is  a  great  mystery,  which  I 
do  not  quite  understand.  Yet  I  too  believe  that  the 
gods  are  our  guardians,  and  that  we  are  a  possession 
of  theirs.^ 

It  is  entirely  consistent  with  mysticism,  as  I  have 
above  defined  it,  that  a  man  should  sometimes  trust 
his  moral  intuitions  before  his  intellect  has  furnished 
him  with  a  logically  coercive  justification  of  them.  I 
do  not  think,  however,  that  in  taking  our  stand  with 
Socrates,  we  are  cut  oJ6f  from  giving  a  better  reason  for 
our  ethical  instinct  than  he  furnishes  in  his  reply  to 
Cebes.  We  can,  I  believe,  translate  his  mystical  lan- 
guage into  ethical  terms.  That  doctrine  uttered  in 
secret,  that  man  is  a  prisoner  who  has  no  right  to  open 
the  door  of  his  prison  and  run  away,  and  that  we  are 
a  possession  of  our  guardians  the  gods  —  what  does 
it  mean  when  reduced  to  terms  of  experience  ?  It 
means  that  man  is  under  obligations  which  are  uncon- 
ditional. It  means  that  we  are  the  trustees  and  deposi- 
taries of  the  highest  and  divinest  thing  in  the  universe. 
Self-conscious  rationality  exists  in  us,  and,  so  far  as 
we  know,  in  us  alone.  When  we  remove  it  in  ourselves 
or  others,  we  are  false  not  merely  to  ourselves,  our 
families,  and  our  nation,  and  not  even  merely  to  hu- 

*  Plato's  Pkedo  Qowett's  translation). 


THE  RIGHT  TO  DIE  253 

manity  at  large;  we  are  traitors  to  the  universe,  de- 
serters from  the  cosmic  army. 

Suicide  was  permitted  under  the  Roman  law,  and 
cases  are  on  record  of  men  obtaining  explicit  permis- 
sion from  the  Emperor  to  resort  to  it.  Yet  its  preva- 
lence forced  Hadrian  to  treat  attempts  at  suicide  on 
the  part  of  soldiers  as  equivalent  to  desertion,  and 
to  punish  them  accordingly.  The  Emperor  was  more 
poetically  inspired  than  he  knew.  The  only  metaphor 
that  adequately  expresses  the  position  of  man  in  this 
life  is  that  which  likens  him  to  a  soldier  already  en- 
listed in  an  army,  and  therefore  pledged  in  honour  to 
accept  without  question  the  main  ends  for  which  the 
army  exists,  and  not  to  abandon  his  duty  until  he 
is  authoritatively  released.  The  army  is  the  army  of 
humanity;  its  flag  is  the  flag  of  the  world;  its  uniform 
is  the  physical  frame  we  bear,  and  the  rational  and 
moral  nature  which  the  whole  of  humanity  has  trans- 
mitted to  each  of  us. 

The  moral  blindness  which  I  have  complained  of 
in  Ingersoll,  finds  its  explanation  in  the  fact,  patent 
to  all  who  read  him  closely,  that  he  was  every  whit  as 
much  obsessed  by  the  traditional  theology  as  were  the 
theologians  whom  he  attacked,  although,  of  course, 
in  a  different  manner.  Just  as  they  always  thought  in 
what  are  called  theological  terms,  so  he  always  thinks 
in  what  are  called  anti-theological  terms.  Just  as  they 
find  the  sanction  for  morality  in  the  alleged  will  of 
their  supernatural  deity,  so  he  argues  that,  since  there 


254  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

is  no  supernatural  revelation,  there  is  no  basis  for 
any  duty  which  conflicts  with  a  man's  apparent  self- 
interest.  This  is  why  he  falls  into  the  utter  absurdity 
of  saying  that,  in  the  case  of  a  suicide,  "he  is  to  bear 
the  injury,  if  it  be  one."  His  anti- theological  animus 
blinds  him  to  the  glaring  fact  that  of  all  human  in- 
juries the  most  insupportable  is  that  which  the  suicide 
inflicts  upon  his  relations.  Let  those  who  have  borne 
this  burden  testify  whether  they  would  not  sooner  die 
ten  deaths,  or  lose  by  natural  bereavement  their  ten 
dearest  connections,  than  suffer  the  mingled  horror  and 
disgrace  of  having  a  wife  or  husband,  parent  or  child, 
commit  suicide.  To  the  pain  of  the  loss  is  added  the 
unutterable  shame  of  an  implied  reproach  which,  how- 
ever undeserved,  can  seldom  be  proved  to  others,  or 
even  to  the  bereaved  themselves,  to  have  been  so. 

There  are  some  who  have  no  more  belief  in  the 
scheme  of  traditional  theology  than  has  M.  Maeter- 
linck or  than  had  Colonel  Ingersoll,  yet  who  have  a 
deeper  sense  than  they  of  the  sanctity  of  this  life,  and 
of  the  unconditional  nature  of  the  claim  of  duty  upon 
our  allegiance.  The  question  for  them  is  not  whether 
we  live  after  death,  or  whether  the  abandonment  of  life 
is  an  offence  against  a  superhuman  personality.  The 
question  is  as  to  the  moral  effects  upon  others  of  our 
acts  in  this  life,  and  as  to  the  way  in  which  we  best 
can  discharge  the  obligations  under  which  each  of  us 
has  been  laid  by  society,  from  the  very  foundation  of 
the  human  world. 


THE  RIGHT   TO   DIE  255 

There  are  those,  indeed,  who  deny  the  existence  of 
duty.  They  maintain  that,  as  we  do  not  choose  to 
come  into  this  Hfe  and  are  not  consulted  as  to  the  cir- 
cumstances under  which  we  are  born,  there  can  be  no 
such  thing  as  a  general  claim  of  humanity  upon  our 
loyalty.  This  position  implies  that  a  man  has  a  right 
to  get  all  he  can  out  of  life  and  to  give  back  as  little  as 
possible  in  return.  It  is  a  doctrine  that  cannot  be  logi- 
cally refuted.  The  man  who  aflirms  it  can  only  be 
asked  to  open  his  eyes  and  look  somewhat  more  stead- 
ily at  the  facts  of  life  than  he  has  hitherto  done.  He 
must  be  asked  to  imagine  what  would  happen  to  him 
if  society  at  large  acted  towards  him  upon  his  own 
principle.  He  may  perhaps,  especially  in  youth,  in  this 
individualistic  and  self-reliant  America,  feel  strong 
enough  to  stand  against  the  world;  he  forgets,  however, 
that  even  the  bodily  strength  and  the  mental  shrewd- 
ness by  which  he  feels  able  to  do  this  are  things  which 
human  society  has  bestowed  upon  him.  He  did  not  (as 
he  has  himself  argued)  make  himself.  He  therefore, 
by  his  own  reasoning,  is  not  the  owner  of  himself.  That 
trick  of  chop-logic  by  which  he  denies  the  brotherly  bond 
of  mankind  is  but  the  flourish  of  a  borrowed  sword. 
And  since  for  him  there  are  no  duties  but  only  rights, 
then  human  society  has  no  duties  towards  him,  but 
only  rights  which  it  may  enforce  against  him.  To  put 
the  point  even  in  the  terms  of  a  cash  bargain,  can  any'in- 
dividual  person  pretend  that  he  has  given  to  mankind 
value  for  value  in  return  for  what  he  has  received  ? 


^S^  CRITICISMS  OF  LIFE 

But  we  have  admitted  that  the  question  cannot  be 
settled  by  argument.  Either  the  validity  of  the  claim 
of  duty  becomes  self-evident  when  fairly  presented,  or 
else  there  is  some  moral  abnormality  in  the  man  to 
whom  it  is  not  so.  I  cannot  prove  to  such  a  man  that 
when  he  sees  a  child  drowning,  he  is  bound  to  do  what 
in  him  lies  to  save  it.  I  can,  however,  tell  him  that  he 
ought  to  need  no  argument  on  this  point,  and  that  the 
very  fact  that  he  needs  one  is  a  proof  of  his  own  perver- 
sion. I  cannot,  by  reasoning,  show  the  coerciveness  of 
the  principle,  "Inasmuch  as  ye  have  done  it  unto  the 
least  of  these  my  brethren,  ye  have  done  it  unto  me." 
This  is,  to  use  old-fashioned  language,  the  logic  of  the 
heart,  not  of  the  head.  ''Le  coeur  a  ses  raisons,  que  la 
raison  ne  connait  pas."  We  are  here  dealing  with  the 
ultimate  facts  of  our  moral  constitution.  We  discover, 
when  the  exigency  arises,  that  we  are  built  this  way, 
and  that,  like  Luther,  we  can  do  no  other.  Happily, 
even  those  men  who  assert  in  words  that  they  do  not 
feel  this  unconditional  imperative  of  conscience,  and 
who  ordinarily  live  in  accordance  with  the  diabolical 
principle  they  proclaim,  are  often  as  blind  to  their  own 
nature  as  to  that  of  others;  and  generally,  when  some 
imforeseen  appeal  is  made  to  the  latent  good  in  them, 
they  find  themselves  acting  by  the  law  which  they 
have  repudiated. 

The  doctrine  that  suicide  is  no  sin,  and  that  imder 
many  circumstances  a  man  has  the  right  to  take  his 
own  life,  is  the  most  dangerously  anti-social  teaching 


THE  RIGHT   TO   DIE  257 

ever  uttered.  Nor  are  its  dangers  remote  or  slow  to 
disclose  themselves.  IngersoU's  utterances  on  the  sub- 
ject were  followed,  as  everybody  remembers,  by  a 
perfect  epidemic  of  suicides  in  the  United  States.  If 
the  misguided  man  had  been  a  careful  student  of  his- 
tory, he  would  have  known  that  the  same  sequence  of 
events  had  occurred  many  times  before.  Seneca  found 
it  necessary  to  protest  against  the  passion  for  self- 
destruction  which  his  own  teaching  had  provoked 
among  his  disciples.  Cicero  tells  us  of  the  Cyrenaic 
philosopher  Hegesias,  whose  teaching  had  earned  him 
the  sobriquet  of  "the  orator  of  death,"  and  whose  elo- 
quent pictures  of  the  fascinations  of  the  tomb  led  mul- 
titudes to  free  themselves  by  suicide  from  the  cares  of 
Hfe. 

It  is  curious  to  observe  the  astonishing  self-contra- 
diction and  self -stultification  to  which  Ingersoll  was 
driven  when  asked  whether  his  teaching  had  not 
caused  many  people  to  take  their  lives.  He  replied, 
"People  do  not  kill  themselves  because  of  the  ideas  of 
others."  On  another  occasion,  in  answer  to  a  similar 
question,  he  said,  "Talk  as  long  as  language  lasts,  you 
cannot  induce  a  man  to  kill  himself.  The  man  who 
takes  his  own  life  does  not  go  to  others  to  find  reasons 
or  excuses." 

That  is  to  say,  this  man,  who  all  his  Hfe  had  de- 
nounced the  wrong  deeds  to  which  people  have  been 
led  by  false  teaching,  was  driven  to  deny  the  connec- 
tion between  teaching  and  practice  when  confronted 


258  CRITICISMS  OF   LIFE 

with  the  horrors  which  his  own  mad  doctrine  had  let 
loose  upon  the  world!  If  it  were  true  that  people's 
conduct  is  unaffected  by  the  doctrine  and  counsel  of 
teachers  whom  they  respect,  then  all  the  diatribes  of 
IngersoU  about  the  horrible  results  of  orthodox  theo- 
logical teaching  would  be  absurd.  The  reason  why 
they  are  not  so,  however,  is  that  there  is  a  real,  natu- 
ral and  inevitable  connection  between  teaching  and 
practice.  Men  imitate  one  another's  deeds,  but  even 
stronger  is  the  impulse  which  leads  them  to  act  upon 
one  another's  coimsel.  The  Smithfield  crowds  in 
Queen  Mary's  day  assisted  or  acquiesced  in  the  burn- 
ing of  Protestants  for  no  other  reason  than  that  they 
had  been  taught  that  heresy  was  the  worst  of  crimes, 
and  that  it  was  accordingly  just  that  the  heretic 
should  be  burned.  The  disciples  of  Seneca  committed 
suicide  because  their  revered  teacher  had  sanctioned 
the  practice.  And  IngersoU  was  as  directly  responsi- 
ble (though,  of  course,  less  intentionally  so)  for  the 
fate  of  the  deluded  wretches  whose  bodies  were  foimd 
with  his  publications  in  their  pockets,  as  Mrs.  Emme- 
line  Pankhurst  and  her  colleagues  were  for  the  insen- 
sate outrages  which  postponed  the  political  emancipa- 
tion of  women  in  England. 

It  is  commonly  maintained  to-day,  particularly  by 
Christian  apologists,  that  the  deep  -  seated  horror  of 
the  European  mind  in  regard  to  self-destruction  is 
a  result  of  the  ecclesiastical  teaching.  Such  thinkers 
point  to  the  contrast  in  this  matter  between  Europe 


THE  RIGHT   TO  DIE  259 

and  the  East.  They  ask  why  it  is  that  life  is  held  so 
lightly  in  China,  where  a  man  will  commit  suicide  on 
your  doorstep  as  a  means  of  insulting  you,  whereas  in 
Europe  the  most  ghastly  symbolism  was  resorted  to  in 
order  to  express  the  horror  evoked  in  the  mind  of  soci- 
ety by  such  an  act.  We  are  told  that  the  burial  of  the 
suicide  in  unconsecrated  ground,  at  the  cross-roads, 
and  with  a  stake  driven  through  his  body,  expressed 
a  mental  attitude  engendered  by  Christianity.  But  I 
have  yet  to  learn  where  in  the  Bible  there  is  any  overt 
and  explicit  condemnation  of  the  laying  of  violent 
hands  upon  oneself.  Hamlet's  notion  that  the  Ever- 
lasting had  "fixed  his  canon  'gainst  self -slaughter"  is 
certainly  a  part  of  the  European  tradition  which  was 
caught  up  and  transmitted  by  the  theologians;  but 
Hamlet  would  not  have  been  able  to  find  the  canon  in 
question  in  the  Jewish  or  Christian  Scriptures.  Instead, 
then,  of  saying  that  it  was  Christianity  which  made 
Europe  condemn  suicide,  the  statement  should  be 
precisely  inverted :  it  was  the  normal  healthy  instinct 
of  Europe  which  made  Christianity  condemn  it.  In 
this  fashion  Christianity  has  been  held  responsible  for 
many  things,  both  good  and  bad,  which  in  truth  form 
no  part  of  it.  It  is  thus,  for  example,  that  the  claim 
is  made  to-day  that  Christianity  emancipated  women 
and  led  to  the  abolition  of  slavery,  despite  the  glar- 
ing facts  that  the  most  horrible  and  oppressive  laws 
against  women,  which  still  survive  in  Germany  and 
England,  were  passed  by  Christian  legislatures,  and 


26o  CRITICISMS   OF   LIFE 

that  every  Christian  nation  practised  slavery  for  cen- 
turies,—  in  some  cases,  down  to  a  century  or  two 
ago.  I  am  not  in  the  least  maintaining  that  slavery, 
or  the  degradation  of  women,  or  suicide,  is  consistent 
with  or  enjoined  by  the  teaching  of  Jesus  Christ.  I  am 
only  drawing  attention  to  the  fact  that  between  his 
teaching  and  that  of  oflScial  Catholicism  and  Protest- 
antism there  is  almost  always  a  great  gulf  fixed.  It  was 
not  Christianity  that  forbade  self-destruction.  It  was 
the  instinctive  aversion  of  humanity  to  the  ultimate 
disloyalty  against  itself.  For  this  aversion,  no  doubt, 
theology  found  reasons.  It  has  been  said  that  "meta- 
physics is  the  finding  of  bad  reasons  for  what  we  be- 
lieve upon  instinct."  Unquestionably  this  is  true  of 
theology,  which  has  hitherto  shown  a  genius  for  find- 
ing the  lamest  of  reasons  for  the  best  of  man's  instinc- 
tive desires  and  aversions. 

The  strongest  ethical  reason  against  suicide  is  that 
suggested  by  Kant's  celebrated  criterion.  We  have  to 
ask  ourselves  what  would  happen  if  everybody  acted 
on  the  principle  on  which  we  propose  to  act,  since  a 
morally  sound  rule  is  one  which  would  produce  bene- 
ficent results  if  universalized.  Apply  this  canon  to  the 
doctrine  of  IngersoU,  and  we  see  at  once  that  it  would 
lead  to  the  extinction  of  human  society.  Every  man 
and  every  woman  sometimes  reaches  a  point  where  to 
die  seems  better  than  to  live.  It  is  not  given  to  the  sons 
of  men  to  pass  through  life  without  experiencing  mo- 
ments (and  happy  are  they  to  whom  such  moments 


THE  RIGHT  TO  DIE  261 

are  rare)  when  Time  seems,  to  use  Tennyson's  words, 
"a  maniac  scattering  dust,  and  Life  a  Fury  slinging 
flame."  If,  at  such  moments,  all  men  and  women  were 
convinced  of  the  truth  of  IngersolFs  idea,  every  Hfe 
would  end  by  suicide.  The  self-destroyer,  says  Inger- 
soll,  is  not  a  coward.  Even  so,  few  men  and  women 
are  so  cowardly  as  to  be  incapable  of  his  act,  if  they 
share  not  only  his  provocation  but  his  principle  of  con- 
duct. If  Francis  Thompson  in  his  outcast  days,  if 
Abraham  Lincoln,  groaning  through  long  years  be- 
neath a  burden  such  as  few  men  have  ever  sustained,  if 
Shakespeare,  in  that  period  of  spiritual  gloom  which, 
according  to  some  critics,  gave  birth  to  his  greatest 
tragedies,  —  if  these  had  shared  the  horrible  individu- 
alistic illusion  that  a  man  has  the  right  to  choose  his 
own  time  and  manner  of  exit  from  the  world,  it  is  self- 
evident  how  ruinous  would  have  been  the  loss  inflicted 
on  mankind. 

Our  conclusion,  then,  is  the  simple  ethical  rule  that  a 
man  should  never  hasten  his  departure  so  long  as  by 
deed  or  word  or  look  he  can  influence  for  good  the 
character  or  the  circumstances  of  any  fellow-mortal. 
It  is  never  certain  that  one  cannot  do  this,  and  conse- 
quently the  conditions  postulated  as  justif)dng  suicide 
can  never  obtain.  But,  in  formulating  our  rule,  we 
have  furnished  ourselves  with  no  excuse  for  judging 
harshly  of  those  pitiable  souls  who  violate  it.  The  more 
a  man  is  impressed  with  the  imperative  claim  of  duty 
upon  himself,  the  more  must  he  strive  to  avert  or  cure 


262  CRITICISMS  OF  LIFE 

those  blinding  misfortunes  which  overbear  the  reason 
and  conscience  of  others,  and  impel  them  to  the  last 
disloyalty.  The  bare  statement  of  the  ethical  rule  may 
indeed  sound  harsh,  but  we  may  point  out  that  it 
is  tempered  by  another  practical  law  which  should 
always  be  remembered  in  connection  with  it — namely, 
that  we  are  to  make  for  others  extenuating  explana- 
tions which  we  may  not  make  for  ourselves.  Every 
suicide  is  an  indictment  of  the  providence  of  society, 
and  we  are  bound  to  feel  that  we  share  the  guilt  of 
all  who,  finding  life  unendurable,  take  refuge  in  self- 
slaughter.  The  modern  world  is  challenged  by  an  ever- 
increasing  number  of  such  cases.  In  Germany  and 
England,  during  the  last  half-century,  the  percentage 
of  self-murders  has  hugely  increased  in  every  decade. 
To  show  the  enormity  of  the  offence  is  but  one  of  the 
steps  that  are  necessary  to  cure  the  evil.  The  other 
and  the  greater  task  is  to  remove  all  those  preventable 
conditions  which  combine  to  produce  it. 


I 


CHAPTER  Vm 

THE  VICTORIOUS  DEATH  OF  CAPTAIN  SCOTT 

The  story  of  the  expedition  made  by  Sir  Robert  Falcon 
Scott  and  his  companions  to  discover  the  South  Pole 
and  to  increase  our  scientific  knowledge  of  the  Ant- 
arctic region,  is  one  that  mankind  will  not  willingly 
let  die.  I  shall  here  give  only  a  brief  resume  of  its  lead- 
ing incidents,  partly  because  the  facts  are  so  familiar, 
but  chiefly  in  order  that  I  may  devote  my  space  to 
a  consideration  of  certain  trains  of  ethical  thought 
which  the  theme  suggests. 

The  question,  Cui  bono  ?  in  connection  with  polar  ex- 
ploration is  hard  to  answer  to  the  satisfaction  of  those 
who  think  of  "good"  only  in  commercial-utilitarian 
terms.  But  it  will  never  be  asked  by  those  whose 
ideal  is  the  heroic  adventurer,  not  the  prudent  huck- 
ster. Of  every  exploring  party,  from  the  days  of  the 
Argonauts  to  those  of  Amundsen,  Peary  and  Scott, 
it  has  been  possible  to  say  beforehand  that  its  risks 
were  great  and  certain,  its  gains  problematical  and 
perhaps  non-existent.  Columbus  spent  years  in  the 
attempt  to  convince  men  that  the  only  answer  to  this 
contention  must  be,  "Try  it  and  see."  Imprudent  or 
not,  it  was  inevitable  in  the  nature  of  man  that  he 
should  not  cease  from  spying  out  his  planetary  domain 


264  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

until  he  had  penetrated  the  last  fastnesses  of  the  un- 
known. Nor  was  it  any  more  improbable  antecedently 
that  something  of  surpassing  worth  should  be  await- 
ing man  amid  the  eternal  snows  than  that  Columbus 
should  blunder  on  this  continent,  mislaid  from  eter- 
nity among  the  wastes  of  the  western  sea.  Experience 
alone  could  decide  either  question.  We  dismiss,  then, 
the  notion  that  the  Scott  party  and  their  equally  ill- 
fated  predecessors  of  the  Southern  and  the  Northern 
night  were  vainly  sacrificed  to  a  gainless  quest.  In  the 
preceding  chapter  we  have  insisted  that  a  man  has 
no  right  to  take  his  own  life.  But  nobody  can  deny 
that  imder  many  circumstances  one  has  a  right  —  and 
often  a  duty  —  to  risk  it;  and  in  our  comfort-worship- 
ping age,  it  is  good  to  have  it  proved  to  us  that  men 
can  still  endure  hardness  for  unselfish  ends. 

To  estimate  aright  the  gallantry  of  Scott  and  his 
colleagues,  we  must  make  some  attempt  to  imagine 
what  is  involved  in  spending  a  year  and  a  half  in  the 
utter  desolation  and  the  pitiless  climate  of  the  great 
Ice  Barrier  and  the  Beardmore  Glacier.  We  who  live 
in  the  comfort  of  civilization  cannot  do  justice  to  this 
feature  of  polar  exploration.  But  we  can  perhaps  form 
some  faint  conception  of  the  suffering  it  entails  if  we 
imagine  ourselves  living  in  canvas  tents,  for  months 
and  months  on  end,  in  the  fiercest  winter  weather 
of  the  North- Western  States. 

This,  however,  is  the  experience  shared  in  common 
by  all  polar  explorers.  What  impresses  one  in  the  case 


DEATH   OF  CAPTAIN   SCOTT     265 

of  the  Scott  expedition  is  the  almost  supernaturally 
bad  luck  which  dogged  their  footsteps  at  every  turn. 
The  collapse  of  the  motor  sledges  was  the  first  of  these 
incidents.  Then  their  pony  transport  failed  them  much 
earlier  than  they  had  anticipated;  and  then  they  seem 
to  have  given  up  their  dogs  sooner  than  was  necessary. 
The  actual  polar  party,  consisting  of  five  men,  had  to 
tug  a  heavy  sledge  hundreds  of  miles  to  the  Pole,  only 
to  be  confronted,  on  arrival  there,  by  the  heart-freezing 
disappointment  of  finding  that  they  had  been  antici- 
pated. 

Their  return  journey  was  hindered  by  blizzard  after 
blizzard;  and  in  the  significant  words  of  Scott,  "we  had 
not  one  completely  fine  day,"  is  contained  a  sufficient 
explanation  of  the  ultimate  tragedy. 

Then  comes  the  record  of  the  collapse  and  death  of 
Petty  Officer  Evans,  "the  strongest  man  of  the  party." 
The  little  company  is  now  reduced  to  four  men,  all 
worn  by  toil  to  the  verge  of  collapse,  and  one  of  them 
already  marked  for  death.  They  are  hindered  in  their 
progress  by  the  ever  -  worsening  illness  of  Captain 
Gates,  who  at  last,  unwilling  to  be  a  burden  upon  them, 
decides  to  lay  down  his  life.  Inexpressibly  moving  is 
the  brief  record,  penned  by  Scott's  dying  hand,  of  his 
companion's  heroism.  After  camp  is  pitched,  and  when 
the  blizzard  is  raging.  Gates  quietly  says,  "I  am  just 
going  outside;  I  may  be  some  time."  If  this  vicarious 
death  was  suicide,  it  was  the  one  suicide  of  which  I 
have  ever  heard  that  seems  completely  justified.  The 


lee        CRITICISMS  of  life 

cenotaph  erected  to  commemorate  the  death  of  Oates 
expresses  in  briefest  form  the  intuitive  homage  of  hu- 
manity to  such  a  self-sacrifice:  ^'Hereabouts  died  a 
very  gallant  gentleman." 

Imagination  reels  in  the  effort  to  follow  the  march 
of  the  three  survivors  to  their  final  camp,  where  they 
arrived  with  food  for  two  days,  but  with  fuel  for  only 
one  meal.  They  were  but  eleven  miles  from  plenty 
and  comparative  safety;  but  they  might  as  well  have 
been  a  thousand.  They  were  surrounded  by  a  blizzard 
which  made  further  progress  impossible,  even  had  they 
been  sufficiently  fed;  and  Scott's  last  message  is  writ- 
ten after  they  have  been  in  their  tent  four  days,  and 
when  they  must,  therefore,  have  been  at  least  two 
days  without  food.  The  pitiless  gale  was  still  raging 
when  the  dying  hand  indited  its  last  message  to  the 
world.  What  happened  afterwards  can  only  be  inferred 
from  the  condition  of  the  tent  when  at  last  it  was  dis- 
covered by  the  rescue  party.  The  bodies  of  Wilson  and 
Bowers  were  wrapped  in  their  sleeping-bags;  that  of 
Scott  was  outside  of  his.  Evidently  he  had  been  able 
to  give  this  last  attention  to  his  friends  between  the 
time  of  their  death  and  his  own. 

One  gathers  the  character  of  Scott,  not  only  from  the 
mere  list  of  events  in  the  expedition,  but  from  many 
little  indications  disclosed  by  his  diary.  First  it  stands 
on  record  that  before  leaving  for  the  Antarctic  he  had 
arranged  that  the  profits  on  his  book  should  all  be 
divided  among  his  companions,  after  their  return.  He 


DEATH   OF  CAPTAIN  SCOTT     267 

had  not  told  them  of  this  arrangement;  the  money  was 
to  come  to  them  in  the  shape  of  a  surprise  bonus. 

It  is  to  be  remembered,  also,  that  the  last  message 
of  Scott  is  the  only  part  of  his  diary  which  was  con- 
sciously written  for  others  to  read.  The  diary  itself 
consists  of  matter  which  he  must  naturally  have  ex- 
pected to  revise  before  publication.  We  may  fairly 
assume,  therefore,  that  it  contains  a  real  disclosure  of 
his  thought  and  feeling,  uncoloured  by  adaptation  to 
the  tastes  or  expectations  of  readers.  It  was  written 
for  the  most  part  when  the  apparition  of  failure  and 
death  was  not  present  to  his  mind.  We  may  thus 
expect  to  obtain  by  reading  it,  and  by  reading  between 
its  lines,  a  more  than  ordinarily  rehable  impression  of 
the  character  of  the  writer. 

One  notes  with  interest  the  unaffected  regret  which 
Scott  expresses  on  each  occasion  when  he  has  to  send 
back  some  of  the  members  of  his  party.  For  all  of 
those  to  whom  the  favour  of  participation  in  the  final 
enterprise  could  not  be  extended,  he  has  words  of 
genuine  S3mipathy. 

Another  characteristic  of  the  man  is  his  repeated 
rejoicing  in  the  harmony  which  prevailed  among  his 
party,  and  in  their  loyalty  to  himself  as  leader.  He 
scarcely  ever  mentions  his  own  share  in  the  work.  Yet 
it  lies  on  the  surface  of  the  narrative  that  the  loyalty 
and  harmony,  for  which  he  is  so  grateful,  must  have 
been  inspired  by  his  own  rare  personal  qualities.  We 
hear  much  of  the  unfailing  ingenuity  of  Petty  Officer 


268  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

Evans;  the  debt  of  the  expedition  to  the  keen  eyes  of 
Bowers  is  repeatedly  commemorated.  There  is  enthu- 
siastic praise  of  the  wonderful  expedition  made  by 
Wilson,  Bowers  and  Cherry-Garrard,  to  the  emperor 
penguin  rookery  at  Cape  Crozier.  Scott  waxes  elo- 
quent in  his  description  of  the  labour  and  suffering 
undergone  by  his  companions  in  a  portion  of  the  ex- 
pedition in  which  he  did  not  participate;  but  there  is 
no  record  of  the  even  greater  trials  and  torments  which 
he  must  himself  have  endured,  apart  altogether  from 
the  tremendous  burden  of  responsibility  which  inevit- 
ably fell  to  the  leader's  share. 

Still  another  indication  of  Scott's  calibre  is  given  in 
his  account  of  the  overwhelming  disappointment  which 
awaited  them  at  the  Pole  itself.  Here  again,  although 
the  blow  fell  heaviest  upon  him,  his  only  thought  is 
for  others:  "It  is  a  terrible  disappointment,  and  I  am 
very  sorry  for  my  loyal  companions. ^^  We  find  no  trace 
of  jealousy  or  resentment  against  his  successful  rival; 
only  a  generous  testimony  to  the  efficiency  of  that 
rivaFs  work :  "There  is  no  doubt  that  our  predecessors 
have  made  thoroughly  sure  of  their  mark,  and  fully 
carried  out  their  programme." 

The  finest  fragment  of  unconscious  self-portraiture, 
however,  which  this  journal  gives  us  is  contained  in 
that  last  moving  message  to  the  public,  which  the 
starved  and  dying  man  penned  at  the  moment  of  utter 
defeat.  From  his  tent  amid  the  eternal  desolation,  with 
the  last  flames  of  life  burning  low,  he  writes,  "I  do  not 


DEATH   OF  CAPTAIN   SCOTT     269 

regret  this  journey.  .  .  .  We  took  risks;  we  knew  we 
took  them.  Things  have  come  out  against  us,  and 
therefore  we  have  no  cause  for  complaint,  but  bow  to 
the  will  of  Providence,  determined  still  to  do  our  best 
to  the  last."  Then,  with  characteristic  self -forge  tful- 
ness,  "Had  we  lived,  I  should  have  had  a  tale  to  tell  of 
the  hardihood,  endurance  and  courage  of  my  compan- 
ions, which  would  have  stirred  the  heart  of  every  Eng- 
lishman." And,  last  of  all,  that  appeal  to  his  country's 
generosity,  on  behalf  of  the  dependents  of  his  compan- 
ions and  himself,  which  could  not  have  failed  to  move 
the  heart  of  any  nation. 

One's  first  reaction  upon  reading  such  a  narrative  is 
a  feeling  of  proud  and  joyous  confidence  in  the  eternal 
fineness  and  dignity  of  the  human  spirit.  It  is  in  the 
midst  of  unrelieved  tragedy,  it  is  in  the  very  heart 
of  the  triumphs  of  evil,  that  we  find  the  refutation  of 
pessimism.  When  I  first  read  the  message  of  Captain 
Scott,  there  sprang  up  at  once  in  my  mind  the  classic 
lament  of  Burke  over  the  decay  of  the  knightly  spirit; 
and,  together  with  it,  the  glad  consciousness  that 
Burke  had  spoken  falsely.  Let  us  recall  his  familiar 
words,  in  order  that  we  may  see  how  completely,  even 
to  detail,  the  story  of  Scott  refutes  them:  — 

The  age  of  chivalry  is  gone.  That  of  sophists,  econom- 
ists and  calculators  has  succeeded;  and  the  glory  of 
Europe  is  extinguished  for  ever.  Never,  never  more  shall 
we  behold  that  generous  loyalty  to  rank  and  sex,  that 
proud  submission,  that  dignified  obedience,  that  subor- 


ayo  CRITICISMS  OF  LIFE 

dination  of  the  heart,  which  kept  alive,  even  in  servitude 
itself,  the  spirit  of  an  exalted  freedom.  The  unbought 
grace  of  life,  the  cheap  defence  of  nations,  the  nurse  of 
manly  sentiment  and  heroic  enterprise,  is  gone!  It  is 
gone,  that  sensibility  of  principle,  that  chastity  of  hon- 
our, which  felt  a  stain  like  a  wound,  which  inspired 
courage  whilst  it  mitigated  ferocity,  which  ennobled 
whatever  it  touched.^  .  .  . 

It  is  characteristic  of  pessimists  to  disregard  the 
good  in  human  things.  They  concentrate  attention  on 
exceptional  evil,  and  forget  that  it  is  exceptional.  They 
forget  that  if  truth,  honesty  and  justice  were  not  al- 
ready dominant  in  large  measure,  the  daily  life  of 
human  society  would  be  rendered  impossible.  The 
heroism  of  Scott,  while  its  context  of  tragic  circum- 
stance enables  it  to  stand  as  a  typical  refutation  of 
Burke's  lament,  discloses  only  an  exceptional  degree 
of  a  quality  which  is  common  to  all  mankind,  and  dis- 
cernible in  the  daily  history  of  every  group  of  human 
beings.  There  are  always  courage,  self-abnegation 
and  readiness  for  death  in  the  service  of  others,  even 
among  the  poorest  and  least  fortunately  circumstanced 
of  mankind.  The  height  of  the  wave  is  evidence,  to 
the  initiated,  of  the  depth  of  the  ocean  from  which  it 
springs;  and  the  individual  character  of  such  a  man  as 
Scott  implies  and  testifies  to  the  presence  of  his  great 
qualities  in  the  reservoir  of  spiritual  life  from  which 
his  own  being  was  drawn. 

^  Burke,  Reflections  on  the  Revolution  in  France. 


DEATH   OF   CAPTAIN   SCOTT     271 

Two  main  lines  of  reflection  are  suggested  by  the 
incident  which  we  are  here  considering.  The  first 
of  these  concerns  the  attitude  of  the  modern  world 
towards  death. 

It  is  imquestionable  that  our  thoughts  nowadays  are 
far  less  directed  towards  death  than  were  those  of  man- 
kind in  the  Middle  Ages.  For  then  the  whole  of  life 
was  consciously  viewed  as  a  preparation  for  death,  and 
for  that  larger  life  which  was  believed  to  he  beyond. 
It  was  one  of  the  great  changes  in  the  human  outlook 
which  accompanied  the  revival  of  learning,  the  out- 
burst of  the  spirit  of  geographical  discovery,  and  the 
emergence  of  the  scientific  spirit,  that  the  centre  of 
attention  was  removed  to  earth,  and  to  the  life  that 
now  is.  In  the  writings  of  Bacon,  the  incarnation  of 
the  spirit  of  science,  we  find  many  protests  against  the 
morbid  focussing  of  attention  on  the  end  of  life,  which 
had  prevailed  down  to  his  time.  He  points  out,  with 
his  usual  keen  psychologica'  insight,  that  there  is 
scarcely  any  motive  in  human  nature  so  weak  but  that 
it  can  overcome  the  fear  of  death.  He  further  affirms 
that  most  of  the  teachings  of  philosophers  and  divines 
had  increased  the  dread  of  death,  while  they  offered  to 
cure  it;  "for,  when  they  would  have  a  man's  whole  life 
to  be  but  a  discipline  or  preparation  to  die,  they  must 
needs  make  men  think  that  death  is  a  terrible  enemy, 
against  which  there  is  no  end  of  preparing." 

Spinoza,  again,  voices  the  growing  protest  of  his  age 
against  a  gloomy  and  excessive  contemplation  of  man's 


272  CRITICISMS   OF   LIFE 

mortality.  "The  free  man,"  he  writes,  "thinks  of  no- 
thing so  little  as  of  death,  and  his  wisdom  is  a  medi- 
tation not  of  death  but  of  life." 

The  modern  world  has  passed  to  an  opposite  extreme 
from  that  of  the  Middle  Ages.  Far  from  needing  the  ad- 
vice of  Bacon  and  Spinoza,  we  need  rather  to  return  to 
something  of  that  seriousness  of  mind  which  made  the 
preparation  for  death  an  essential  part  of  the  business 
of  life.  Our  attitude  to-day  is  perhaps  best  expressed 
in  the  words  of  W.  K.  Clifford:  "That  love  of  action 
which  would  put  death  out  of  sight,  is  to  be  counted 
good,  as  a  holy  and  healthy  thing,  necessary  to  the 
life  of  men,  serving  to  knit  them  together,  and  to  ad- 
vance them  in  the  right." 

Whether  this  be  sound  advice  or  not,  it  is  undeniable 
that  it  reflects  the  actual  practice  of  mankind.  But  is 
there  not  a  prof ounder  wisdom  ?  Is  there  not  a  middle 
course  between  the  mediaeval  brooding  over  death,  and 
the  modem  anxiety  to  forget  it?  Clifford  was  a  brave 
spirit,  whose  early  demise  was  a  grievous  loss  to  man- 
kind: and  it  is  with  no  desire  to  reflect  upon  him  that 
I  criticize  his  counsel  in  this  matter.  But  there  seems 
something  shallow,  something  even  of  what  is  called 
Dutch  courage,  in  the  poUcy  of  putting  death  out 
of  sight.  It  reminds  one  somehow  of  that  wave  of  the 
arm  by  which  Mr.  Podsnap  was  wont  to  banish  into 
oblivion  anything  repugnant  to  the  great  Victorian 
English  god  of  comfort  and  bourgeois  respectability. 

If  Spinoza  is  right  in  asserting  that  the  free  man 


DEATH   OF  CAPTAIN  SCOTT     273 

thinks  of  nothing  so  little  as  of  death,  it  can  only  be  in 
the  sense  that  the  free  man  has  already  thought  out 
to  the  end  the  prospect  of  death,  and  made  his  peace 
with  it.  Only  then  is  he  truly  free  —  only  then  can  he 
afford  not  to  think  of  it;  just  as  the  athlete,  who  has 
undergone  thorough  training,  need  not  trouble  himself 
with  the  question  of  his  fitness  when  the  hour  of  the 
struggle  comes. 

We,  to-day,  are  in  general  far  removed  from  this 
high  freedom.  We  have  put  death  out  of  sight;  we 
have  not  reconciled  ourselves  to  it.  And  because  we 
have  only  banished  the  spectre  but  not  laid  it,  we  are 
apt  to  be  smitten  with  horror  at  every  suggestion  of 
its  re-appearance.  How  many  of  my  readers  have  ever 
in  their  lives  devoted  ten  minutes  to  meditation  on 
the  thought  that  they  too  must  surrender  their  being  ? 
How  many  of  us  have  sought  in  any  way  to  make  our 
peace  with  death,  or  to  decide  whether  we  loyally 
accept  a  life  which  carries  with  it,  as  an  inevitable  con- 
dition, the  death  of  the  body?  It  is  our  business  to 
think  this  question  out  to  the  end;  and  only  when  we 
have  done  so,  can  we  be  "free  men"  in  the  sense  of 
Spinoza. 

Various  are  the  ways  in  which  men  have  made  terms 
with  the  so-called  last  enemy.  The  most  common,  and 
the  one  which  probably  would  still  serve  the  great 
majority  of  people,  if  they  seriously  considered  the 
subject,  is  the  thought  of  personal  immortality.  I  can- 
not here  examine  this  doctrine  in  detail,  and  must  con- 


274  CRITICISMS  OF  LIFE 

tent  myself  with  remarking  that  there  is  an  inherent 
weakness  in  it  from  the  point  of  view  of  our  moral  and 
spiritual  victory  over  our  lower  nature.  I  am  not  at 
the  moment  raising  the  question  of  the  truth  of  the 
doctrine.  It  may  or  may  not  be  the  fact  that  death  is 
the  gate  of  a  larger  Hfe.  My  point  is  that  the  man  who 
overcomes  his  fear  of  death  by  means  of  his  belief  in 
immortality,  has  not  really  vanquished  his  fear  at  all. 
To  deny  the  existence  of  death,  as  our  Christian  Sci- 
ence friends  do  explicitly,  and  our  orthodox  friends 
implicitly,  is  not  to  attain  victory  over  it.  There  is, 
indeed,  some  truth  in  the  bitter  words  of  the  satirist 
who  declares  that  he  who  finds  his  refuge  in  the 
thought  of  immortahty,  has  been  so  completely  over- 
come by  the  fear  of  death  that  he  refuses  to  die  on  any 
terms.  Spiritual  triumph  is  only  attained  by  the  man 
who  is  ready  for  annihilation,  and  who  accepts  the  gift 
of  life  with  that  stern  possibility  attached  to  it. 

Another  class  of  men  there  is,  who,  irrespective  of 
the  thought  of  immortality,  welcome  death  because 
they  are  at  outs  with  life.  Complete  pessimism  falls 
naturally  below  what  Sir  John  Seeley  called  the  "sui- 
cide-mark." And,  short  of  such  despair,  it  is  obvious 
that  world-weariness,  or  any  profound  dissatisfaction 
with  the  changes  and  chances  of  this  mortal  life,  will 
make  a  man  take  comfort  in  the  thought  of  death 
merely  as  an  alternative  to  an  existence  so  unsatis- 
factory. This  is  the  attitude  expressed  in  the  great 
threnody  of  Shelley  upon  the  death  of  Keats.  Keats 


DEATH   OF  CAPTAIN   SCOTT     275 

is  happy  in  that  he  has  escaped  the  woes  inevitable  to 
man:  — 

He  is  not  dead,  he  doth  not  sleep, 
He  hath  awakened  from  the  dream  of  life;  . 
'Tis  we  who,  lost  in  stormy  visions,  keep 
With  phantoms  an  improfitable  strife, 
And  in  mad  trance  strike  with  our  spirit's  knife 
Invuhierable  nothings.  We  decay 

Like  corpses  in  a  chamel;  fear  and  grief 
Convulse  us  and  consimie  us  day  by  day. 
And  cold  hopes  swarm  Hke  worms  within  our  living  clay. 

He  has  outsoared  the  shadow  of  our  night. 

In  like  manner,  Keats  himself  welcomes  the  thought 
of  dissolution  as  a  refuge  from  the  ills  of  life.  Every 
lover  of  the  "Nightingale"  Ode  knows  by  heart  the 
reason  why  the  poet  is  "half  in  love  with  easeful 
death."  It  is  because  for  him  this  world  is  a  place 

.  .  .  where  men  sit  and  hear  each  other  groan, 
Where  palsy  shakes  a  few  sad,  last  grey  hairs. 

Where  youth  grows  pale,  and  spectre-thin,  and  dies: 
Where  but  to  think  is  to  be  full  of  sorrow, 
And  leaden-eyed  despairs; 
Where  beauty  cannot  keep  her  lustrous  eyes,  > 
Or  new  love  pine  at  them  beyond  to-morrow. 

The  same  note  of  world-weariness  rings  through 
much  of  our  modern  poetry.  To  Swinburne,  in  some  of 
his  moods,  the  lot  of  man  seems  one  of  inevitable  and 
arbitrary  frustration.  Human  aspirations  have  been 
foreordained  to  failure  by  the  gods  from  "before  the 
beginning  of  years."  Thus,  in  the  very  spirit  of  the 


1^6  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

Greek  tragedians,  he  pronounces  the  doom  of  human 
striving,  in  that  memorable  picture  of  Man  which 
closes  the  ^'Atalanta''  chorus:  — 

His  speech  is  a  burning  fire, 

With  his  lips  he  travaileth; 
In  his  heart  is  a  bUnd  desire, 

In  his  eyes  foreknowledge  of  death; 
He  weaves,  and  is  clothed  with  derision; 

Sows,  and  he  shall  not  reap; 
His  life  is  a  watch  or  a  vision 

Between  a  sleep'  and  a  sleep. 

Death,  therefore,  is  welcome,  if  not  for  its  own  sake  or 
for  life's  sake,  at  least  as  a  haven  of  escape  from  life:  — 

From  too  much  love  of  Hving, 

From  hope  and  fear  set  free, 
We  thank,  with  brief  thanksgiving, 

Whatever  gods  may  be. 
That  no  Hfe  lives  for  ever; 
That  dead  men  rise  up  never; 
That  even  the  weariest  river 

Winds  somewhere  safe  to  sea. 

And  again,  in  the  haunting  cadences  that  close  his 
''Ave  atque  Vale"  to  Baudelaire,  it  is  the  incurable 
troublesomeness  of  life  that  makes  death  welcome:  — 

Content  thee,  howsoe'er,  whose  days  are  done. 
There  lies  not  any  troublous  thing  before, 
Nor  sight,  nor  sound,  to  war  against  thee  more; 

For  whom  all  winds  are  quiet  as  the  sun, 
All  waters  as  the  shore. 

Probably  no  more  seductive  embodiment  of  the  idea 
tinder  discussion  could  be  found  than  these  poetic  pre- 


DEATH  OF  CAPTAIN   SCOTT     277 

sentations  of  it  which  I  have  quoted;  yet,  despite  the 
magic  of  the  poets,  we  cannot  fail  to  detect  the  note  of 
morbidity  in  their  strain.  We  refuse  to  assent  to  the 
doctrine  that  life  is  inherently  and  irremediably  evil; 
and  if  we  can  make  our  peace  with  death  only  by  em- 
bracing this  teaching,  then  with  death  we  must  remain 
unreconciled.  But  is  there  no  alternative  to  the  choice 
between  the  hope  of  immortality  and  the  despair  of 
this  Hfe?  Are  we  shut  up  to  selecting  one  or  the  other 
of  these  two  horns  whereon  to  impale  ourselves  ? 

Not  so.  There  is  still  another  attitude  towards 
death,  which  can  be  adopted  by  those  of  us  who  neither 
stake  our  faith  upon  the  thought  of  eternal  existence 
for  the  individual,  nor  are  willing  to  stultify  our  life  in 
this  world  by  implying  that  release  from  it,  on  any 
terms,  were  better  than  its  continuance.  This  third 
attitude  is  hinted  at  by  the  mediaeval  Catholic,  St. 
Francis  of  Assisi,  and  is  brought  out  into  clear  relief  in 
the  ultra-modern  American  poet  of  democracy,  Walt 
Whitman.  In  his  "Canticle  of  the  Sun,"  St.  Francis 
gives  thanks,  with  profound  insight,  for  "our  sister, 
the  death  of  the  body.''  And  Whitman,  in  lines  which 
are  dear  to  many  in  the  Ethical  Movement,  who  have 
known  them  by  heart  for  years,  praises  the  fathomless 
universe  as  whole-heartedly  for  "the  sure-enwinding 
arms  of  cool-enfolding  death"  as  he  does  "for  life  and 
joy,  and  for  objects  and  knowledge  curious,  and  for 
love,  sweet  love."  Almost  startling  in  their  daring 
seizure  of  what  to  many  is  the  most  piercing  of  the 


278  CRITICISMS  OF  LIFE 

thorns  of  life,  are  his  words  of  welcome  to  the  ghostly 
visitant:  — 

Dark  mother,  always  gliding  near  with  soft  feet, 
Have  none  chanted  for  thee  a  chant  of  fullest  welcome  ? 
Then  I  chant  it  for  thee;  I  glorify  thee  above  all; 
I  bring  thee  a  song,  that,  when  thou  must  indeed  come,  thou 
come  unfalteringly. 

Here,  surely,  is  the  rare  equipoise  of  sanity  and  viril- 
ity. Here  is  the  harmony  which  we  are  seeking.  It  is 
because  the  singer  is  in  love  with  life  that  he  welcomes 
death,  the  inevitable  condition  of  life.  It  is  because 
"Life's  gift  outruns  his  fancies  far"  that  he  is  prepared 
to  accept  it  subject  to  the  proviso  that  it  must  end. 
How  far  in  advance  is  this  of  the  attitude  which  would 
put  death  out  of  sight!  How  much  finer,  morally  and 
spiritually,  than  the  attitude  which  considers  death 
only  a  make-believe,  only  the  entry  to  a  fuller  life! 

To  the  reader  who  has  followed  me  thus  far  I  need 
not  repeat  that  I  do  not  deny  immortality  as  a  fact. 
My  attitude  towards  it  is  one  of  suspended  judgment. 
The  would-be  scientific  evidence  for  it  seems  to  me,  as 
I  have  shown  in  an  earlier  chapter,  as  futile  as  the  dog- 
matic materialism  which  imdertakes  to  prove  it  impos- 
sible. My  point  here  is,  however,  that  the  man  who  de- 
pends morally  on  the  hope  of  immortality,  is  ipso  facto 
morally  poorer  than  he  who  does  not.  There  is  a  defect  in 
the  cosmic  patriotism  of  one  who  needs  this  assurance; 
and  in  these  days,  when  men  are  losing  their  hold,  much 
more  extensively  than  is  generally  imagined,  upon  the 


DEATH   OF  CAPTAIN   SCOTT     279 

belief  in  a  life  hereafter,  it  becomes  increasingly  peril- 
ous to  seek  in  such  a  quicksand  our  moral  anchorage. 
The  only  way  to  true  spiritual  freedom  and  to  ulti- 
mate peace  is  to  regard  this  life  as  the  sphere  of  duty, 
and  to  accept  duty  itself  as  the  supreme  and  uncondi- 
tional goal  of  existence.  Such  was  the  depth  of  moral 
insight  attained  by  St.  Teresa,  who,  as  the  legend  goes, 
was  seen  with  a  lighted  candle  in  one  hand,  and  a 
bucket  of  water  in  the  other,  and,  being  asked  what 
these  were  for,  replied  that  she  wished  to  bum  up 
heaven  and  to  extinguish  the  flames  of  hell,  in  order 
that  men  might  love  God  with  a  love  uncorrupted 
either  by  fear  of  punishment  or  by  hope  of  reward. 
This  heresy  of  the  Catholic  saint  is  an  instance  of  the 
finest  ethical  orthodoxy.  If  our  attitude  towards  life 
be  thus  centred  on  the  fulfilment  of  duty,  if  we  regard 
this  frame  of  things  as  having  for  its  final  cause  the 
manifestation  of  man's  highest  m.oral  attributes,  we 
at  once  obtain  a  perfectly  clear  orientation.  We  are  at 
once  committed  to  a  willing  acceptance  of  life,  so  long 
as  it  can  be  made  to  last;  and  we  shall  be  equally  ready, 
when  our  day  closes,  to  sing  with  joy  what  Bacon  calls 
the  sweetest  canticle  of  all,  "Now  lettest  thou  thy 
servant  depart  in  peace." 

The  second  problem  which  the  fate  of  Scott  forces 
us  to  consider  is  that  of  the  standard  of  success  in 
life.  What  constitutes  success  ?  I  put  aside  entirely 
the  vulgar  materiahsm  which  would  define  it  in  terms 


28o  CRITICISMS  OF  LIFE 

of  cash  or  of  newspaper  publicity.  I  assume  that  none 
of  my  readers  needs  to  be  converted  from  a  criterion, 
the  fallacy  of  which  is  as  obvious  as  its  vulgarity.  The 
question  I  put  to  myself  is  whether  even  that  finer 
standard,  which  makes  success  dependent  on  the  reali- 
zation of  one's  conscious  aim  in  life,  does  not  also  need 
revision.  That  this  is  the  criterion  of  success  adopted 
by  many  whose  character  and  whose  ethical  insight 
are  entitled  to  our  respect,  does  not,  I  think,  need 
proving.  The  defect  of  such  a  standard  is  that  it 
groups  among  failures  those  who  have  given  to  man- 
kind the  very  finest  and  most  heroic  examples  that 
have  irradiated  the  pathway  of  history. 

Judging  by  this  standard,  Robert  Scott  failed,  and 
Roald  Amundsen  succeeded.  Judging  by  it,  too,  mar- 
tyrdom is  inevitably  a  proof  of  failure.  Yet  do  we 
not  feel  that  there  is  something  amiss  with  a  criterion 
which  classes  among  failures  such  men  as  Socrates, 
Jesus,  Sir  Thomas  More,  Hugh  Latimer,  and  Robert 
Scott,  and  such  a  woman  as  Joan  of  Arc  ?  In  regard  to 
each  of  these  we  feel,  intuitively,  the  appositeness  of 
the  note  of  triumph  which  Milton  sounds  over  the 
death  of  Samson,  in  the  "Samson  Agonistes":  — 

Nothing  is  here  for  tears,  nothing  to  wail 
Or  knock  the  breast;  no  weakness,  no  contempt, 
Dispraise  or  blame;  nothing  but  well  and  fair, 
And  what  may  quiet  us  in  a  death  so  noble. 

Yet  how  can  this  attitude  of  exultation  be  made  to 
consist  with  the  verdict  of  failure  on  such  lives  ?   Is  not 


DEATH   OF  CAPTAIN   SCOTT     281 

such  triumphant  acclamation  the  very  hall-mark  of 
success  ? 

To  return  to  our  modem  instance,  has  not  Captain 
Scott,  by  the  manner  of  his  death,  conferred  upon 
humanity  something  far  finer  than  his  triiunphant  re- 
turn would  have  involved  ?  To  say  this  is  not  to  mini- 
mize the  tragedy  of  his  loss;  it  is  only  to  insist  upon  the 
eternal  value  which  mankind  undaimtedly  extracts 
from  the  greatest  temporal  woes.  The  spontaneous 
testimony  of  our  consciousness  affirms  that  the  attain- 
ment of  the  South  Pole  is  worth  far  less,  morally,  than 
the  explorer's  approximation  to  the  high  meridian  of 
spiritual  triumph.  The  glory  of  the  Antarctic  Mid- 
night Sun  is  dim  indeed,  when  compared  with  the 
"supersolar  blaze"  of  the  victory  of  the  soul  over  the 
body,  and  over  the  hostility  of  the  outward  world. 

The  criterion  of  success  which  I  would  seek  to  form- 
ulate, must  give  a  rational  justification  to  the  sponta- 
neous feeling  of  triumph  inspired  in  us  by  the  heroic 
death  of  the  martyr.  And,  upon  analysis,  our  way  to 
formulate  such  a  criterion  seems  to  become  clear.  It 
is  undeniably  a  fact  that  there  is  in  every  man  and 
woman  something  greater  than  the  individual  will. 
Each  of  us  is  a  transitory  incarnation  of  a  universal 
will,  however  we  may  describe  it  —  whether  as  the  will 
of  God  or  of  humanity.  Now  in  the  triumph  of  this 
greater  will  —  in  the  fulfilment  of  the  organic  law 
of  our  spiritual  being  —  there  is  attained  a  success 
far  outshining  in  splendour  the  achievement  of  one's 


282  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

conscious  personal  aim  in  life.  The  manifestation,  in 
despite  of  a  hostile  world,  of  those  qualities  of  charac- 
ter which  command  the  immediate  admiration  of  all 
disinterested  observers,  constitutes  the  success  of  the 
racial  will;  and  frequently  the  very  condition  of  this 
success  is  the  failure  of  one's  conscious  purpose.  In 
every  case  of  martyrdom  worthy  of  reverence,  from 
Socrates  down  to  Robert  Scott,  it  is  this  greater  suc- 
cess which  accounts  for  the  triumphant  exaltation  of 
our  hearts  in  the  face  of  grimmest  tragedy.  Let  us 
say,  then,  that  success  consists  either  in  fulfilling  one's 
conscious  ^purpose  or  in  exemplifying  the  organic  trend 
of  the  general  will  of  man  ;  and  only  that  life  is  a  fail- 
ure in  which  neither  of  these  ends  is  attained. 

Upon  the  rude  monument  which  marks  the  last  rest- 
ing place  of  Scott,  Bowers  and  Wilson,  are  inscribed 
the  closing  words  of  Tennyson's  "Ulysses":  "To 
strive,  to  seek,  to  find,  and  not  to  yield."  The  lines 
which  end  with  these  words  interpret  not  only  the 
spirit  of  the  explorer,  but  the  whole  history  of  human 
advance.  They  nobly  sum  up  the  high  adventure 
of  humanity,  its  aeonian  striving  against  incalculable 
odds: — 

One  equal  temper  of  heroic  hearts 

Made  weak  by  time  and  fate,  but  strong  in  will 

To  strive,  to  seek,  to  find,  and  not  to  yield. 

In  the  unpathed  desolation  of  the  Antarctic  snows, 
cut  off  for  ever  from  all  that  he  held  dear,  knowing  that 
he  should  never  see  again  the  face  of  wife  or  child,  and 


DEATH   OF   CAPTAIN   SCOTT     283 

awaiting  the  approach  of  death,  Scott  was  able  to  say, 
"I  do  not  regret  this  journey."  May  we  so  live  that 
at  the  last  —  in  utter  desolation,  if  so  it  must  be  — 
neither  we  nor  they  who  look  to  us  for  example  and 
strength,  shall  find  aught  for  regret  in  the  tale  of  our 
journey  through  the  wilderness  of  this  world.  ^ 


EPILOGUE 

IN  THE  TIME  OF  WAR  AND  TUMULTS 

September,  igi4 
It  will  be  evident  to  the  reader  of  the  foregoing  chap- 
ters that  they  were  penned  and  made  ready  for  publi- 
cation before  the  descent  of  that  avalanche  of  insanity 
by  which  at  the  present  moment  Europe  is  over- 
whelmed. Without  venturing  upon  prophecy,  the 
author  cannot  refrain  from  expressing  the  hope  that 
before  these  words  meet  the  reader's  eye,  the  war  will 
have  become  a  memory.  To  write  of  such  matters 
under  such  circumstances  is  in  itself  difficult  and  em- 
barrassing; but  to  one  placed  as  the  author  is,  the 
difl&culty  becomes  so  great  that  it  may  well  seem  an 
unwarrantable  temerity  to  attempt  it  at  all.  On  the 
other  hand,  silence  at  such  a  juncture,  in  one  who  had 
presimied  to  offer  counsel  on  social  and  moral  issues, 
might  seem  an  evidence  not  alone  of  incompetence 
but  of  cowardice. 

Although,  like  all  other  members  of  Peace  Societies, 
whether  in  America,  in  England  or  in  the  European 
countries,  I  had  long  been  convinced  that  the  com- 
petition in  naval  armaments  between  England  and 
Germany,  and  in  military  equipment  between  Ger- 
many and  her  Continental  neighbours,  must  inevitably, 


EPILOGUE  285 

at  some  time,  issue  in  strife,  yet  the  expected,  when 
it  befell,  seemed  to  me  unexpected  and  incredible.  I 
little  thought,  when  I  landed  in  England  on  the  first 
of  June  last,  that  before  I  sailed  again  for  home,  I 
should  see  my  native  country  transformed  as  by  magic 
into  an  armed  camp  —  its  intellectual  and  industrial 
life  in  abeyance,  its  credit  system  so  disturbed  that 
Bank  of  England  notes  could  with  difficulty  be  ex- 
changed for  gold,  and  the  maturing  of  liabihties  had  to 
be  deferred  by  means  of  a  moratorium;  its  struggle  for 
social  justice  to  the  poor  and  to  women  arrested,  and 
its  party  strifes  and  class  antagonisms  quelled  and 
replaced  by  undreamed-of  fraternity  and  singleness  of 
purpose.  No  layman,  uninitiated  in  the  subterranean 
secrets  of  diplomacy,  could  have  foreseen  that  the 
treasonable  talk  of  civil  war  in  Ireland  would  so  soon 
be  replaced  by  union  between  Nationalists  and  Ul- 
stermen,  both  patriotically  declaring  in  the  House 
of  Commons  that  they  would  join  in  defending  the 
shores  of  Ireland  against  invasion  from  abroad. 

The  case  was  the  same  with  the  multitude  of  Ameri- 
can tourists  who  went  to  taste  the  fruits  of  the  long 
centuries  of  culture-history  treasured  up  in  the  cities 
of  continental  Europe.  Not  one  of  them  dreamed  that 
his  holiday  journey  would  develop  into  so  unprece- 
dented an  adventure  as  for  thousands  of  them  it  has 
proved.  Protracted  security  had  dulled  our  imagina- 
tions, and,  like  the  dwellers  in  Messina  and  in  ancient 
Pompeii,  we  had  forgotten  the  titanic  energies  beneath 


286  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

and  around  us,  which  could  at  any  moment  over- 
whelm us  and  plunge  the  nations  into  lamentation 
and  mourning  and  woe. 

The  failure  of  the  mass  of  us  to  anticipate  the  cata- 
clysm at  this  time,  however,  can  scarcely  be  ascribed 
to  defect  of  political  insight.  For  all  forecasting  of  the 
course  of  human  affairs  necessarily  presupposes  the 
continuance  of  average  sanity  among  mankind,  just  as 
scientific  calculation  assumes  the  continuous  work- 
ing of  the  normal  and  familiar  forces  of  nature.  Like 
thousands  of  other  Englishmen,  I  had  travelled  and 
studied  in  Germany,  and  always,  after  the  first  few 
days  of  my  sojourns  there,  had  well-nigh  forgotten 
that  I  was  not  at  home.  The  identity  of  race,  the 
family  connection  of  speech,  the  cultural  similarity 
between  England  and  Germany,  seemed  certain 
pledges  of  continuous  amity.  Never  before,  through 
all  the  stormy  centuries,  had  England  and  Germany 
been  at  strife.  The  perfect  kindliness  of  my  German 
hosts  and  friends,  the  solidarity  of  interests  of  individ- 
uals and  classes  of  both  peoples,  and  of  the  two  na- 
tions, in  their  common  efforts  for  the  enduring  inter- 
ests of  humanity,  were  so  complete  that  the  notion  of 
warfare  between  them  seemed  fantastic.  Nor  was  it 
to  be  supposed  that  those  responsible  for  the  policy  of 
the  two  countries  could  become  oblivious  to  the  dem- 
onstrated fact  that  no  nation,  even  though  victorious, 
can  profit  economically  by  war.  These,  however,  are 
considerations  which  it  is  idle  to  address  to  the  capital- 


EPILOGUE  287 

ists  of  international  murder,  to  emperors  drunk  with 
mutual  jealousy  and  lust  of  power,  or  to  professional 
militarists  aching  to  apply  the  skill  and  the  weapons 
they  have  mastered. 

I  will  not  disobey  the  wisest  voice  which  has  been 
heard  in  these  distracted  times  —  that  of  our  great 
and  revered  President  —  by  seeking  to  analyze  the  im- 
mediate causes  of  this  war  or  to  apportion  the  blame 
for  its  precipitation.  This  is  not  the  time,  nor  am  I 
the  man,  to  cast  a  verdict  which  only  the  calm  and 
fully  informed  judgment  of  posterity  will  be  able  to 
render  with  perfect  equity.  Yet  there  are  some  con- 
siderations which  even  at  this  moment  may  serve  to 
comfort  the  consciences  of  all  who,  during  the  past 
ten  years,  have  laboured  for  a  policy  by  which  peace 
could  be  not  only  maintained  but  effectively  insured 
for  the  future.  To  me  it  is  a  satisfaction  to  recall 
that  during  those  years  I  protested  many  times  in 
England,  by  speech  and  writing,  against  what  seemed 
the  mistaken  and  dangerous  foreign  policy  of  my  na- 
tive country.  But  the  voice  of  that  tiny  minority  of 
us  which  pleaded  for  a  rapprochement  with  Germany, 
and  against  the  dragging  of  England  at  the  chariot- 
wheels  of  Russia,  was  as  that  of  one  crying  in  the 
wilderness.  The  influence  of  newspapers  openly  or 
covertly  seeking  to  promote  the  interest  of  the  arma- 
ment capitalists  was  sufficiently  loud  and  widespread 
to  drown  the  voice  of  humanity  and  prudence,  and 
to  keep  public  opinion  in  such  a  condition  that  no 


288  CRITICISMS   OF   LIFE 

effective  opposition  could  be  raised  to  Sir  Edward 
Grey's  pro-Russian  undertakings. 

On  the  other  hand,  the  spirit  of  impartiality  de- 
mands the  recognition  of  two  facts :  first,  that  the  lay 
world  is  not  in  possession  of  all  the  data,  and  that 
there  may  have  been  many  reasons  for  the  policy 
pursued  by  Sir  Edward  Grey  which  it  has  not  yet  been 
possible  for  him  to  disclose;  and,  secondly,  that  efforts 
have  undoubtedly  been  made  more  than  once  by  the 
British  Cabinet  to  arrive  at  a  basis  of  understanding 
with  Germany.  We  must  not  forget  those  "  unofficial' ' 
secret  missions  undertaken  by  Lord  Haldane  —  a 
*'good  European"  if  ever  there  was  one;  nor  can  we 
fail  to  perceive  that  obstacles  too  great  for  him  to 
overcome  must  have  been  formidable  indeed. 

The  outstanding  lesson  of  the  immediate  situation 
is  the  fact  that  nowhere  in  the  world  has  democracy  as 
yet  attained  to  the  control  of  foreign  policy.  Here  in 
America  it  is  mistakenly  assumed  by  most  journalists 
that  in  this  matter  there  is  a  great  difference  between 
the  United  States  and  the  monarchies  and  Kaiser- 
doms  of  Europe.  The  difference,  however,  is  by  no 
means  so  great  as  it  appears:  and  for  this  reason,  — 
that  whenever  among  a  group  of  nations  one  or  two 
are  despotically  governed,  and  conduct  their  inter- 
national affairs  in  secrecy  and  upon  the  principles  of 
Machiavelli,^  it  is  impossible  to  have  publicity  and 

1  Note,  for  example,  the  candid  admission  of  Prince  von  Biilow, 
in  his  Imperial  Germany,  that  national  egoism  is  the  only  standard 


EPILOGUE  289 

democratic  control  of  those  affairs  in  any  of  the  other 
nations.  When,  several  months  ago,  President  Wilson 
urged  the  passing  of  the  Panama  Tolls  Repeal  Bill,  he 
told  Congress  that  if  that  measure  were  not  passed  the 
American  Government  would  be  involved  in  interna- 
tional difficulties  of  great  delicacy  and  complexity. 
No  ordinary  American  citizen  and  no  journalist  — 
nay,  not  even  the  members  of  the  Senate  and  House 
of  Representatives  —  really  knew  to  what  he  alluded. 
And  certainly  that  minority  of  writers  in  our  Press 
which  last  spring  was  clamouring  for  war  with  Mexico, 
and  sneering  at  the  Secretary  of  State  for  his  splendid 
and  successful  efforts  to  avert  it,  was  altogether  oblivi- 
ous of  the  world-wide  conflagration  which  might 
easily  have  been  precipitated  if  their  bellicose  desires 
had  been  granted.  Democratic  as  America  is,  it  is  no 
whit  more  so  than  are  England  and  France;  and  the 
idea  that  the  mass  of  the  electors  here  controls  the 
foreign  policy  of  the  United  States  is  virtually  as  com- 
plete a  delusion  as  it  would  be  in  France  or  England. 
The  foreign  policy  of  democracies  is  controlled  by  the 
Czars  and  Kaisers  of  despotic  countries,  since  these, 
having  the  power  to  make  war,  can  force  defensive 
militarism  upon  the  nations  they  menace. 
Yet  the  American  idea,  delusion  as  it  is,  defines  an 

that  governs  German  foreign  policy.  Remember,  too,  that  in  this 
matter  he  is  only  more  candid  than  the  statesmen  and  diplomatists 
of  other  nations,  since  all  have  acted  upon  the  principle  which  he 
confesses.  I  would  refer  also  to  the  history  of  the  pan-German 
movement  in  Professor  Roland  Usher's  masterly  treatise  on  Pan- 
Germanism.    (Boston:  Houghton  MiflElin  Company,  1913.) 


290  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

ideal.  Throughout  Europe  and  America  democracy 
ought  to  do  this  thing  which  it  is  here  mistakenly  be- 
lieved that  democracy  does.  One  cannot  but  hope  that 
as  a  result  of  this  war  there  will  be  such  an  advance 
towards  constitutionalism  in  Russia,  Austria  and  Ger- 
many that  the  Weltpolitik  of  those  three  nations  will 
actually  be  dominated  by  their  electorates.  Only  then 
will  it  be  possible  for  the  same  kind  of  control  to 
be  actualized  in  England,  France  and  America.  And, 
step  by  step  with  the  gradual  attainment  of  this  ideal, 
the  following  lessons  must  be  learned,  and  the  condi- 
tions which  they  show  to  be  necessary  for  the  main- 
tenance of  peace  must  be  brought  about:  — 

(i)  Each  nation  must  realize  that  hitherto  the  end 
which  every  Government  has  consciously  or  uncon- 
sciously laboured  for  in  international  polity  has  been 
not  the  good  of  its  nation  as  such,  but  the  advantage 
of  capitalists.  England  fought  the  Boer  War  for  the 
benefit  of  the  cosmopolitan  financiers  who  controlled 
the  diamond  mines  of  Kimberley  and  the  goldfields 
of  the  Witwatersrand.  Behind  the  Mexican  chaos  lay 
perceptibly  the  conflicting  interests  of  the  European 
and  American  capitalists  of  the  oil  industry.  The 
French  people  had  no  concern  in  the  conquest  of 
Morocco;  here  again  it  was  the  desire  of  capitalists 
(and  not  alone  French  capitalists,  but  the  financiers 
of  all  Europe)  to  exploit  the  resources  of  the  country 
which  brought  about  the  shedding  of  blood.  Thus  has 
it  been  until  now  with  the  diplomacy  of  the  entire 


EPILOGUE  291 

world;  and  not  one  of  the  wars  of  recent  times  — 
least  of  all  the  present  war  —  would  have  been  en- 
tered upon,  had  the  decision  of  international  questions 
been  governed  by  consideration  for  the  interests  of 
nations  as  such. 

It  is  here  that  we  touch  upon  the  essential  weakness 
of  the  celebrated  argument  of  Mr.  Norman  Angell. 
It  is  perfectly  true,  as  he  contends,  that  as  a  whole 
and  in  the  long  run  a  nation  inevitably  loses  by  war, 
even  though  it  be  victorious  in  the  technical  military 
sense.  But  it  is  not  true  that  groups  of  capitalists,  rep- 
resenting interests  sufficiently  strong  to  enable  them 
at  critical  moments  to  sway  the  balance  between  peace 
and  war,  are  bound  to  lose  by  the  wars  which  they  pro- 
voke. International  capitalism,  as  it  has  developed  in 
Europe  and  America  during  the  past  fifty  years,  has 
demonstrated  itself  to  be  a  thing  so  soulless  that  it 
will  always  act  for  the  furtherance  of  its  interests,  no 
matter  what  nation  may  suffer  or  be  ruined  in  the 
process.  The  democratic  Weltpolitik  of  the  future  is 
bound  to  see  to  it  (even  though  experience  should 
prove  that  this  can  only  be  done  by  setting  up  the 
economic  regime  of  socialism)  that  these  interests 
shall  be  deprived  of  their  decisive  voice  in  the  settle- 
ment of  international  diifferences. 

(2)  The  next  pre  -  requisite  of  a  civilized  foreign 
policy  must  be  the  abolition  of  all  private  trading, 
both  international  and  intra-national,  in  armaments 
and  lethal  weapons  of  every  description.  The  nations 


292  CRITICISMS  OF  LIFE 

of  Europe  are  to-day  plying  their  mutual  destruction 
with  weapons  which  they  have  made  for  one  another. 
The  c)niicism  of  a  firm  at  Birmingham  or  Essen  ex- 
porting, for  private  profit,  weapons  which  will  quite 
probably  be  used  against  Englishmen  or  Germans,  is 
so  inhuman  that  no  adequate  characterization  of  it  is 
possible.  Yet,  under  the  hypnotizing  idolatry  of  busi- 
ness in  which  we  are  all  involved,  we  have  patiently 
suffered  it  to  go  on.  Here  again,  we  must  remember, 
the  beam  is  in  our  own  eye  as  well  as  in  that  of  Europe. 
Had  there  been  war  between  the  United  States  and 
Mexico,  our  men  would  have  been  shot  down  with 
guns  suppKed  to  Mexico  from  America.  Now,  there  is 
only  one  way  to  deal  effectually  with  this  situation, 
and  that  is  by  abolishing  all  private  manufacture  of 
and  trading  in  weapons  of  destruction.  Each  nation 
must  make  this  business  a  national  monopoly,  and  in- 
ternational law  must  prohibit  any  nation  from  supply- 
ing any  other  with  armaments.  Only  in  this  way  can 
such  scandals  be  obviated  as  those  which  were  recently 
brought  to  light  in  Germany  —  where  the  noble  So- 
cialist Liebknecht  exposed  the  corrupt  control  exer- 
cised by  the  Krupps  over  the  Press  and  over  import- 
ant departments  of  the  Government — and  in  Japan, 
where  naval  officers  have  been  convicted  of  receiving 
bribes,  also  from  the  Krupps.  I  have  already  alluded  to 
the  state  of  things  in  England,  where  influential  news^ 
papers  are  controlled  in  the  sinister  interests  of  the 
armament  monopolists.  If  there  have  not  been  scan- 


EPILOGUE  293 

dais  of  the  same  kind  in  the  United  States,  it  is  still 
notorious  that  incalculable  evil  is  done  here  through 
private  trading  in  pistols.  Schemes  of  regulation  and 
licensing  cannot  prevent  this  harm  so  long  as  private 
firms  are  suffered  to  have  a  pecuniary  interest  in  sup- 
plying revolvers  to  anybody  who  wishes  for  them.  In 
Chicago,  there  is  never  apparently  any  difficulty  in  the 
way  of  a  highway  robber  who  wishes  to  provide  him- 
self with  the  deadly  tools  of  his  anti-social  business; 
the  result  being  that  homicides  in  Chicago  are  more 
than  twelve  times  as  frequent  as  in  London.  If  the 
trade  in  arms  were  monopolized  by  the  Federal  Gov- 
ernment, this  mountainous  scandal  —  which  is  so  con- 
stantly before  our  eyes  that  we  have  become  psychi- 
cally blind  to  it  —  would  be  rendered  impossible. 

(3)  The  objective  of  all  humanitarians  [who  be- 
lieve in  the  inviolability  of  nations  should  be  the 
establishment  of  an  effective  treaty  between  America, 
Germany,  France  and  England^  for  the  maintenance 
of  peace  among  themselves  and  for  its  enforcement 
throughout  the  rest  of  the  world.  With  democratic 
control  of  foreign  policy  in  each  of  the  nations  speci- 
fied, such  a  scheme  would  become  feasible,  Utopian  as 
it  may  sound  at  the  present  moment.  These  four  na- 
tions, reinforced  as  they  would  be  by  their  colonial 
dominions,  would  represent  a  force  such  as  no  con- 
ceivable combination  of  other  powers  could  dream  of 
attacking;  and  the  pact  might  in  time  be  extended 
to  include  Russia.  A  perfectly  impartial  court  for  the 


294  CRITICISMS   OF  LIFE 

adjudication  of  international  differences  —  impartial, 
because  it  should  represent  all  the  nations,  small  as 
well  as  great,  with  equal  delegations  —  should  be 
established,  as  also  an  international  police,  both  by 
sea  and  land,  sufficient  to  prevent  any  aggression  as 
between  other  nations.  No  country  would  venture 
upon  the  exploitation  of  its  weaker  neighbours  if  it 
knew  that  it  would  have  to  encounter  the  armed  forces 
not  only  of  its  victim  but  of  this  invincible  union  of 
world-powers. 

It  is  idle  to  say  that  such  a  fourfold  joining  of  hands 
in  the  cause  of  peace  is  impossible.  If  it  were  so,  the 
hope  of  the  pacific  development  of  humanity  would 
be  a  delusion.  Such  a  union  requires  only  that  level 
of  common  honesty  and  mutual  good  faith  among 
nations  which  already  exists,  which  is  the  necessary 
pre-condition  of  the  commerce  of  the  world,  and 
which  would  have  sufficed  to  prevent  the  present  war 
in  Europe  save  for  that  sinister  influence  of  emperors 
and  of  armament-mongers  which  our  hypothesis  as- 
sumes to  be  eliminated  from  the  future  situation. 

Amid  the  clash  of  those  peoples  over  whom  the  de- 
stro3dng  angel  is  passing,  so  that  soon,  alas!  there 
will  be  no  house  where  there  is  not  one  dead,  we 
in  America  have  cause  for  unspeakable  thanksgiving. 
We  shall  prove  ourselves  unworthy  of  our  high  destiny 
if  we  suffer  the  feuds  and  the  estranging  hatreds  of  the 
Old  World  to  blaze  out  on  our  soil.  To  all  Americans 
of  European  birth  who  genuinely  give  to  America 


EPILOGUE  295 

their  highest  loyalty,  I,  born  in  England,  a  candi- 
date for  the  citizenship  of  this  Republic,  offer  the  hand 
of  fellowship,  and  this  word  of  comfort  in  the  grief  that 
afficts  us  all:  Remember  that,  though  your  countries 
and  my  country  are  at  war,  our  country  is  at  peace 
with  all  mankind.  May  she  preserve  her  unity,  and 
that  nobly  disinterested  tradition  in  foreign  policy 
manifested,  to  the  admiration  of  all  Europe,  in  Cuba 
and  Mexico:  so  that,  when  the  vials  of  apocalyptic 
wrath  beyond  the  seas  are  spent,  she  may  enter  to 
motion  peace  —  the  welcome  arbitress  of  Europe's 
dissensions,  the  trusted  daughter,  first  of  England, 
but  in  lesser  degree  of  all  the  nations  now  at  strife, 
called  in  to  cover  their  shame  and  to  mediate  the 
purgation  of  their  sins. 


THE  END 


CAMBRIDGE  .  MASSACHUSETTS 
U    .    S    .   A 


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